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When I wrote a sample client to accompany a web service I'd developed, I used VS2005 and a Sams "ASP.NET in 24 hours" book. I suspect seasoned MS stack people would recommend something else.
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That's fine and I even like using .net, but at any point MS can pull a VB6 "not supported" on any technology or part of your stack while it has known vulnerabilities and you can't do anything but chew on it. How can you even put a cost on that?
I agree with your main point ("don't be a sharecropper" [1]), but as for the VB6 example, I don't think this is particularly convincing. It's not like VB6 users haven't had enough time to move over to VB.NET, and if they don't want to, they can still create applications using VB6. Existing VB6 applications are not suddenly going stop working because Microsoft isn't officially supporting VB6. What does 'support' mean…
If Microsoft applies the same practice to ASP.NET some day, and a buffer overrun exploit is found, what are your alternatives?
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Before you've launched you can use the development versions. Once you've moved into an office the licensing cost doesn't really matter relative to other expenses. We spend 13 times more money on cell phone contracts per month at Loopt than we do on MS software licensing (Office, Exchange, Windows Server, VS 2008, SQL Server, etc). Payroll is astronomically more. If the relatively minuscule amount of money you're savi…
costs may not be the biggest problem, but what about the freedom to make changes to the source (to fix a bad exploit, add a feature, ...)? I still remember the telecom, I used to worked for, being burned by them; we had to pay x thousand dollars for a pre-release patch/bug fix for their black box software... Speed and quality of evolution/innovation is another factor. MS generally doesn't like open source (their sour…
Sorry to go off-topic, but what were they catching up to exactly? I wasn't aware of anything LINQ-like in open source (not that I'm always aware of these things).
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costs may not be the biggest problem, but what about the freedom to make changes to the source (to fix a bad exploit, add a feature, ...)? I still remember the telecom, I used to worked for, being burned by them; we had to pay x thousand dollars for a pre-release patch/bug fix for their black box software... Speed and quality of evolution/innovation is another factor. MS generally doesn't like open source (their sour…
> it took forever for MS to catch up to open source with LINQ Sorry to go off-topic, but what were they catching up to exactly? I wasn't aware of anything LINQ-like in open source (not that I'm always aware of these things).
There are various slick data access techniques available in open source, but LINQ is not a knockoff of any of them.
I'm interested in playing with the Microsoft stack a bit more, for the usual reasons people play with languages they don't work with. Can anyone recommend a sweet spot to aim at (is ASP.NET MVC really usable yet?) and maybe a book or guide? When I wrote a sample client to accompany a web service I'd developed, I used VS2005 and a Sams "ASP.NET in 24 hours" book. I suspect seasoned MS stack people would recommend some…
Manning has an early access version of ASP.NET MVC in Action that may help you on the book front, but I can't vouch for it. Books for brand new technologies are always a tricky topic. Worst case, there's all sorts of info all over the blogosphere.
The best general-purpose .Net book I have that the moment is Apress's immense Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform (Fourth Edition). It covers all the general C# and .Net stuff and also has all the new LINQ pieces, lambda expressions, etc.
VS 2008 has some nice enhancements for web development, including some nice CSS debugging pieces that help you isolate where a bit of style is coming from and a decent JavaScript IDE with a debugger.
For database access, you can use LINQ, NHibernate, or the (prerelease) Entity Framework. If you've worked with Hibernate on Java, NHibernate is an obvious choice. Otherwise, LINQ is pretty slick, and there's a ton of information out there on it.
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costs may not be the biggest problem, but what about the freedom to make changes to the source (to fix a bad exploit, add a feature, ...)? I still remember the telecom, I used to worked for, being burned by them; we had to pay x thousand dollars for a pre-release patch/bug fix for their black box software... Speed and quality of evolution/innovation is another factor. MS generally doesn't like open source (their sour…
> it took forever for MS to catch up to open source with LINQ Sorry to go off-topic, but what were they catching up to exactly? I wasn't aware of anything LINQ-like in open source (not that I'm always aware of these things).
.NET world: NHibernate - NHibernate came out years before LINQ (though a good bit after Hibernate). It was stable and powerful. Besides NHibernate there were other similar .NET open source projects, but I'm not familiar with them
The same thing can be said of NAnt and NUnit
I'm interested in playing with the Microsoft stack a bit more, for the usual reasons people play with languages they don't work with. Can anyone recommend a sweet spot to aim at (is ASP.NET MVC really usable yet?) and maybe a book or guide? When I wrote a sample client to accompany a web service I'd developed, I used VS2005 and a Sams "ASP.NET in 24 hours" book. I suspect seasoned MS stack people would recommend some…
ASP.NET MVC is pretty close to release, so I wouldn't be afraid of it. If you know Rails or Django, many of the same concepts will be applicable. Manning has an early access version of ASP.NET MVC in Action that may help you on the book front, but I can't vouch for it. Books for brand new technologies are always a tricky topic. Worst case, there's all sorts of info all over the blogosphere. The best general-purpose .…
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> it took forever for MS to catch up to open source with LINQ Sorry to go off-topic, but what were they catching up to exactly? I wasn't aware of anything LINQ-like in open source (not that I'm always aware of these things).
Actually, some of Microsoft Research's Haskell experts have done work to take the concepts from LINQ and port them to Haskell, because it's a cool idea that didn't exist there. Taking monadic combinators and applying them to the problem of generalized querying is indeed something that hadn't been done before. There are various slick data access techniques available in open source, but LINQ is not a knockoff of any of…
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Actually, some of Microsoft Research's Haskell experts have done work to take the concepts from LINQ and port them to Haskell, because it's a cool idea that didn't exist there. Taking monadic combinators and applying them to the problem of generalized querying is indeed something that hadn't been done before. There are various slick data access techniques available in open source, but LINQ is not a knockoff of any of…
imho I still feel LINQ is a knockoff and a really late one (years late). to MS's credit LINQ does bring a lot of improvements; mainly in shorter, more concise syntax
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I agree with your main point ("don't be a sharecropper" [1]), but as for the VB6 example, I don't think this is particularly convincing. It's not like VB6 users haven't had enough time to move over to VB.NET, and if they don't want to, they can still create applications using VB6. Existing VB6 applications are not suddenly going stop working because Microsoft isn't officially supporting VB6. What does 'support' mean…
Actually, a previous company I worked at does have to move away. They have what they believe was one of the largest VB6 apps anywhere. It had its own embedded VBA as well. Now they have an enforced rewrite, and yes, it didn't mean it stops working that day, but they have licenses for VBA which they pass on to customers which DO expire (as in, they can't keep selling their product!). Now they have to move years of wor…
May I ask if this company you used to work for has now embraced open source?