To VB or .Net to Be
Uuugggh, no more technology. Non-geeks, as well as the more qualified real geeks in the house, can skip over this pointless regurgitation. Tonight I finished up some work-related training on VB.Net. Yes, you read that right. I never pass up free training. However, for a number of reasons, it’s been hard for me to form a conclusion on the subject of .Net. For the most part, it seems like Microsoft has managed to redesign their development environment to be much easier and more powerful, at the same time hiding some of the obvious flaws. (We Mac users want to know, how did you guys last so long with those DLL install errors?) These are pros that are likely to be seen by the end user and present themselves as tangible benefits to developers as well. And after using Visual Studio .Net for just a few classes, it is obvious that the higher level of thought didn’t stop at the framework either. A lot of effort has been put into making the development application somewhat smarter to use. Intellisense is an admittedly nice feature, although I’ve already seen it in Homesite and Dreamweaver MX. Suffice to say, all of this programming stuff has become fairly interesting to me. I’ve even installed Apple’s free developer tools on my Mac to see how it measures up. So far, aside from the fact that one of them doesn’t do .Net, the price point seems to be the most glaring difference (VB Studio is over $2,000, while Apple’s Project Builder is free—who says Apple doesn’t treat their developers nicely).
