Geeky Baldisms

I have just returned from a week of asp.net training, at the behest (and the kind compliments of) my employer.

First impression: I've given dot net programmers WAY too much credit. With Visual Studio, asp.net is quite simple to pick up. At least it was simple for a PHP developer. It's quite simple, IMHO, lots of dragging and dropping.

Second impression: I was helped by a year of creating Access apps in the late 90's. The experience of using Visual Studio 2008 is, to me, quite similar to using Access 97. I'm certain that the next version will sport the same bastardized Vista-type interface that some idiots at Redmond have decided that MS customers want.

Third impression: One of the biggest things that my (excellent) instructor, Brandon Ahmad, stressed, was that there was a lot of power in using caching to speed up your web apps. I found this ironic, because if the ungodly load of MS overhead wasn't present at server level, there would be no need to speed things up. Without a doubt, if you're looking to get the most out of your hardware, stick with Linux and the rest of the LAMP suite.

The official Microsoft training session was written by outsourced contractors, and I would rate it a 5 out of 10. Lots of errors, typos, and poor writing. But Brandon did a remarkable job of cutting through the poor workmanship of the course and gave me the knowledge I need to jump in and begin building effective, slick .net apps.

Unfortunately, I WILL have to create a 2008 Server VM to run them on.

Back to the crappy Vista interface...