Thursday, May 31, 2007
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A lack of enthusiasm in the Microsoft world?

Martin Fowler’s recent blog post about Ruby and Microsoft has some good points. But he, like many outside the Microsoft space, make a faulty assumption about why there seems to be a lack of excitement in the Microsoft space.

I don’t believe the lack of excitement is because we’re all bored. Conversely, the lack of excitement is because we’re overwhelmed. Who has time to be excited? Not only do we all have real work to do with the technologies we have today, but on our doorstep is a mounting pile of new and potentially better technologies.

There’s certainly some truth to the idea that alpha geeks (or uber-geeks) live for the thrill of technology. But even most uber-geeks are finding the incredible pace of Microsoft product releases to be overwhelming.

We’re not just talking about pure dev tools, and perhaps that’s the problem. We’re talking about Biztalk Server, SharePoint Server, Microsoft Office itself and a whole bunch of other programmable server products. Each of these can be thought of as massive frameworks that a developer can tap into.

That’s on top of the peripheral dev tools like VSTS and TFS and all the various versions of Visual Studio Developer/Test/whatever. (Fowler is right on this one – few if any organizations divide their people into such rigid roles and Microsoft did a bad thing by defining their SKUs the way they did.)

Then there are the major platform-changers like AJAX and Silverlight. And the related tooling like Expression Blend and the rest of the Expression Suite. Like it or not, developers are almost certainly going to have to learn not only these technologies, but these not-really-designed-for-the-developer type tools. You can’t build a meaningful WPF or Silverlight app without using Blend. Sorry, but there it is.

If that isn’t enough to get a person scared, then there are the actual dev tools. A new version of Visual Studio (code-named Orcas) is mere months away, just as many people are moving to VS 2005. A new version of .NET (3.0) is already out, and yet most people have barely looked it. And along with VS Orcas will come .NET 3.5, which is in many ways a bigger change than 3.0!!

For application architects the challenges here are tremendous. How to exploit the productivity gains offered by all these new and upcoming technologies, and yet mitigate the risks they entail. Is it cheaper, for a given project, to use Windows Workflow or Biztalk Server? How much time could be saved by switching an application’s file store over to SharePoint Server, but what’s the cost in terms of learning that new API/framework?

Given the broad lack of real-world experience with these new technologies, there’s no realistic way to know what the cost/benefit will be for any given technology. Even those of us “in the know” are barely aware of the true value propositions and risks they pose.

At the same time, it is a faulty assumption to think that we’re not excited. Like a great many people in the Microsoft space, I am very excited about the upcoming language features in C# and VB! There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that LINQ will literally transform the way we write code.

And then there’s the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) coming in Silverlight, along with VBx and other dynamic languages like Ruby and Python. Take all the incredible coolness of VB 9 with LINQ and the related language enhancements, then add a liberal coating of fantastic dynamic language features (beyond the ones VB has had since day 1) and who wouldn’t be excited!?!

But at the same time, you’ll have to forgive the vast majority of developers if they see all this as a double-edged sword. Any major change comes with a price: a period of weeks or months of reduced productivity. For an alpha/uber geek this might be weeks, but it is still a productivity killer.

I don’t know what it is like outside the Microsoft world, but in our world we are busy, busy, busy!! A few weeks or months of reduced productivity to become proficient at WPF, WCF, WF, LINQ and all the other new language features is a hard pill to swallow. From a business planning perspective, the unknowns involved in such huge changes is very risky, and so is also a hard pill to swallow.

Yes, every single one of these technologies is totally awesome! Having spent a lot of time with WPF over the past few weeks, I can say that it is a serious productivity killer, and yet I haven’t had so much fun building a UI in years. Given another few weeks I imagine I’ll be building WPF UI’s just as fast as I can with Windows Forms, but those UI’s will be far more flexible and will require substantially less code to write.

Personally, I want to build my WPF app and then run it on a Microsoft Surface platform. Welcome to the world of Star Trek!! :)

Thursday, May 31, 2007 6:19:41 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [27]  | 

Thursday, May 31, 2007 6:30:43 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
I agree completely. People are not bored; they're in shock. They literally can't comprehend all the things they need to know to be optimally effective, and they know that. It gnaws at them. But they have far too much to do to invest the time to become proficient in a half dozen radically new technologies.

I've done a keynote at VSLive a couple of times on complexity, and I've lost count of the number of people who contacted me afterwards and said something like "I thought it was only me! I'm overwhelmed, and I don't know what to do."

It's an admission of weakness to lay that state of shock and uncertainty out in the open, so Martin may not be seeing it. But it's there.
Billy Hollis
Thursday, May 31, 2007 8:24:07 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
+1. Like Billy, I see people just standing and staring with their mouths open and eyes wide. They're overwhelmed by what we show to them at conferences, and that doesn't even scratch the surface of what's underneath. As a developer today, it's nearly impossible to get on top of *all* of the technologies and be proficient in them. When .NET came along, it was the C#'ers and VB.NET guys all figuring out what this .NET was but it was a pretty naked CLR, many things had to be built from scratch, and there were few options when it came to implementing certain strategies. 2.0 gave us generics, anonymous delegates, and a host of other things that people still gawk at when they see for the first time. Now we hit them with LINQ, DLR, extensions, and a vast of other technologies to choose from. And that's not even getting into the tools themselves. For us mere mortals, it's great because we have an entire garden of topics to pick from. For the developers who are consuming this stuff, it's a titan of knowledge that they're trying to cram into their 9 to 5 jobs. I certainly emphasize with them and wonder some days myself how to get over that mountain.
Bil Simser
Friday, June 01, 2007 5:51:10 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
COMPLETELY AGREED!!

And the biggest issue I see is what you mention regarding application architects. These technologies, many of them, are quite half-baked and certianly do not have enough road-time.

It's different this time around, it's not like the introduction of .NET 2.0 or .NET itself.

IMO, .NET is making the same mistake C++ did 7 years ago - an explosion of complexity/size, which basically makes the platform unusable.

Wish it didn't go down that road :-/.
Sahil Malik
Friday, June 01, 2007 6:16:26 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Overwhelmed is surely an understatement. The problem I see from the base is that the top (Microsoft) don't seems to listen us anymore. Yes Scott Guthrie is here and surely an alien in the Mcirosoft land, but he can't represent all Microsoft on his own (unless he never sleep!).
I am like many developers, just starting using Visual Studio 2005 and deploying a couple of applications. I am using Ajax Microsoft now, and the learning curve is really steep if you want to follow what's coming out from Redmond.
On the other hand, as you mention in your post, you need to use a full range of products like Expression Studio if you want to comprehend all the sweetness of WPF and Silverlight, so the decision to release some of the Expression components to a narrow band of MSDN subscribers is beyond me and against all the pretenses that Microsft is more opened than it used to be.
Now I also blame Microsoft for showing too much cool demos publicly,like the fantastic airlines company Scott demonstrate recently, when I am still struggling with basic common every day tasks.
In those demos, they show too much the tip of the iceberg, and surely pass quickly the fact that somebody behind has worked weeks and weeks to prepare an hour demo.
I would like to see more real ground and realistic demos in the next Microsoft presentations, not just something that at the end nobody will really do.

Paschal
Paschal
Friday, June 01, 2007 6:55:08 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
If I've said it once I've said it a thousand times. If I ever meet Bill Gates I will do two things. First, I'll shake his hand, congratulate him on his success and thank him for my own. Then I'm going to punch him right in the mouth!

Mark Bonafe
Friday, June 01, 2007 7:09:50 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Spot on. I've been trying to get up to speed on WPF, LINQ and Silverlight in the past few months, and there is so much to learn. And in many cases its not merely a case of learning a few new API calls but embracing whole new paradigms of development and building an understanding of the "best practices" for that technology.
Mark Heath
Friday, June 01, 2007 7:14:59 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
I'm afraid I do have to agree with Martin a little.

I've run a huge usergroup for the last couple of years (2500+ developers, www.sdn.nl) with members from all corners of development world and the enthousiasm displayed by a Delphi or FoxPro developer is much larger than a .NET developer. Don't get me wrong, there are people out there who are very enthousiastic about all Microsoft technologies, I'm one of them, but if I'd have to throw a ball park number out there, then I'd say that 50% of the Delphi programmers are active in communities whereas only 5% of the Microsoft developers do more than 'just show up for work'.

I always like to say that in any profession you have workers and you have craftsmen. Workers come in for the paycheck. Craftsmen take pride in their work, love it and go the extra mile. The Microsoft arena perhaps has ratio wise a larger % of workers. Why? Anyones guess. Perhaps the whole certification processes and quality of tooling make it easier to be a worker in Microsoft land then in other products..

Anyway, that's my 2 cents.
Mark Blomsma
Friday, June 01, 2007 9:01:38 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
I'm not sure I can add much more than has already been said by the others but I'll give it a shot anyway...

I appreciate MS everyday for the career I've been able to build while using their tools. Unfortunately, learning these tools has almost become a career in itself. I've lost the discussed excitement for my career. I used to spend countless hours trying to hone my skills to become a better developer by learning the languages and techniques and tools on my own time. I've come to realize that the more I try to learn, the less I know. I can't keep pace so I've stopped trying to be proactive and only learn what my job forces me to. I hate being that way too because it was the learning that I loved to do, now its only down when its a necessity.

Much like Surgeons and Doctors, many of us have to become MS product specialists. My fear is in picking the wrong "specialty" to align myself with to only be left behind or playing catch up in other specialties if I chose wrong.

Until things settle down (if they ever do?), I've decided to slow my life down and enjoy activities outside of my career. I actually stress less and still get my job done. I figure I learn quick enough that when I need to, I'll pick up on what ever gets thrown my way. That might not be a good thing but at least I get a more restful sleep not having to dream "code".
Cali LaFollett
Friday, June 01, 2007 12:54:05 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Nice post, Rocky. I agree with you regarding the quantity of stuff coming out of Redmond. I think Martin's points are equally valid, though, and I don't think the two perspectives are mutually exclusive.

One specific point of contention. You wrote: "You can’t build a meaningful WPF or Silverlight app without using Blend. Sorry, but there it is."

I have to object, because we're building a WPF app without using Blend. Not sure what else there is to say there.

Cheers from NYC,
Luke
Luke Melia
Friday, June 01, 2007 1:08:18 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
> I have to object, because we're building a WPF app
> without using Blend. Not sure what else there is to say there.

Yeah, I knew I was going on a limb with that statement.

And yet, if you look at the sheer quantity of XAML produced by Blend when you start creating beautiful, animated UIs it is quite clear that a company would be insane to pay someone to write and debug that sort of thing by hand.

I too, have built some "meaningful" apps without Blend. Stuff that looks and works much like Windows Forms. Stuff without much (or any) animation, fancy blends or any real use of the cool WPF features. But totally functional nonetheless, and very meaningful from a business perspective.

What I'm getting at, is that to really exploit WPF, and to make it worth using (over Windows Forms in particular), you need to tap into the cooler capabilities. And it simply isn't cost effective for most organizations to write that kind of XAML by hand - not for an app of any size at least.
Rockford Lhotka
Saturday, June 02, 2007 1:06:48 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Personally, I think you should write another desperate Wrox book and tell us all how any of this matters.

What "business planning"? I would dump anything anyone mentions on the blog as flexible or is excited about. That is how competition makes money and gets proper work done and sold, not using sexy toys and influence from the crowd.
Bloxer
Saturday, June 02, 2007 1:17:24 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
> There’s certainly some truth to the idea that alpha geeks (or uber-geeks) live for the thrill > of technology.

I have a lack of enthusiasm for Ruby and VB and NET and Silverlight and AJAX.

Can you help?


I don't see people solving problems at all in this blog circular, they just create more so they can justify their time lost approaching the overload of: CONFIDENCE SMASHERS.

But ego cannot be destructed right Rocky?
We th
Sunday, June 03, 2007 11:48:14 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
>> And yet, if you look at the sheer quantity of XAML produced by Blend when you start
>> creating beautiful, animated UIs it is quite clear that a company would be insane
>> to pay someone to write and debug that sort of thing by hand.

I wish I could show you what we were doing, because it's not your WinForm-esque business app, but rather a rich visual experience. Put your name on the list at ript.com to check it out when we go to a public beta. Perhaps Blend produces that quantity of XAML for the same reason early FrontPage produced so much HTML? Not having experimented yet with Blend, I'm uninformed on that side of the equation.

One serious problem with code-generating significant portions of you app (and isn't using Blend basically code-generation?) is the difficulty of versioning , tracking, and trouble-shooting changes through version control. If you've ever tried creating and maintaining SSIS packages created by the SSIS desginer, you may know what I'm talking about.

I guess all this is to say that I have a trust problem with "designers" (the tools not the people). :)
Luke Melia
Wednesday, June 06, 2007 8:42:38 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
When Microsoft produces MSUnit, etc... when we already have NUnit - when they create Linq over SQL when we have NHibernate. When they make ObjectBuilder, when we have Castle Windsor/Spring.NET

Then yes, we are overwelmed.

Bored though because we have to learn the same tools all over again. Instead of them being innovative, they are making us step backwards because they FAIL TO SEE THE VALUE OF THE OSS .NET COMMUNITY. It's like 'here are tools, go make something'. We make something, then they say 'let us take that from you now - thank you'.

MS can add great things to the core framework (XAML)- fantastic. But, why not embrace the technologies we are building in our communities and give them the support they need?

ie. I heard they want to build MVP at MS. Why not support Castle's Monorail?

It's frustrating at the very least right now to be a Microsoft developer. The .net framework, C# - fantastic - upcoming LINQ - fantastic. That is exciting, but when they do as above, I lose interest.
Steve
Wednesday, June 06, 2007 3:07:36 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Overwhelmed indeed. I went to MEDC to get a head start on WM6 .NETCF programming, only to find out that in the conference down the hall, Silverlight and the DLR just piled a whole new set of technologies I wish I had time for on my plate.

I'm boning up on my Xaml, writing some code to exercise the new capabilities that Orcas is opening up and all that on top of a full work load. I haven't been this excited about .NET since generics. But I'm letting the WCF and WF fall beside the wayside, because I just can't fit that on my todo list right now.

I've had some passionate discussions with Ruby heads and most of our differences are how much of our programming should be declarative and how much should be functional. Yeah, Ruby is hot right now, but I see it coming more at the expense of perl and php than C#. If anything knowing the value of a good VM, IronRuby makes .NET more appealing, if you ask me.
Arne Claassen
Wednesday, June 06, 2007 8:55:11 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Im overwhelmed from the .NET 3.0 name days !!!

As on open source .Net developer and with 2 jobs, I can only do more if my day has 40 hs or if my wife divorce from me :P

There is too much, and when you get it, there is not enough, I dont move to Vista, and dont move to .NET 3.0, I dont need it, I dont want it today. All my code is working so nice with C#, I refine my frameworks, my codegenerators, etc and now I must use XAML, no dude sorry,

I get so many frustrations porting our little in-house ERP to VS2005 that we are tired.

Im a passionate developer, but these days can kill anyone, the fight TestDriven vs M$ make me so sick that I preffer to slow down a bit and keep my jobs done at work, M$ will not pay my taxes anyway :P

Good luck for the ones in "the edge" I will be watching you from behind :P

Marcos Meli
.NET Open Source Developer
www.filehelpers.com
Marcos Meli
Thursday, June 07, 2007 1:46:17 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Yes sure.
All those legal action and licence problem seems very exciting too.
And if you need a feature, just wait a couple of years and relax.
Exciting
nicolas
Friday, June 08, 2007 7:50:08 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Rocky’s post was a painful reminder to me about my old vb6.0/vb5.0 days. During those days, I thought that VB 5/6 is a very big ocean and don’t need worry about any other technology/platform/framework. There was a perfect storm called Java on horizon and here was ostrich like me with head buried in the VB 6.0 technology. I became an undesired, unwanted, untouchable and jobless software professional with out-dated skills during late 2000. I have also seen C++ programmer with 16 years experience working as security guard.

If any programmer who has not undergone that turbulence and thinks that .Net is a big ocean, I will highly recommend him the Book “Beyond Java” by Bruce A. Tate.

Java was the Perfect Storm as there were perfect conditions and early warnings like C++ backlash, OO emergence, internet take off and Microsoft backlash. Still lot of us failed to read it including Mr. Gates. Next storm is going come with very few indications.

There is lot of truth in Rocky’s post. Our commitments do not give us luxury of working on latest/cutting edge technology and to be Alpha Geek/Einstein. But it will be prudent to keep gauging the direction of windfall by watching what alpha geeks are doing and saying. It may not advisable to jump into a technology which has a niche market like less than 10%. But we should know in our gut feeling when the adoption rate of a particular language/technology/platform goes from 10% to 90%, we should be ready to join the bandwagon regardless of fact that bandwagon belongs to Microsoft or not. Martin Fowler is trying to give that push to Ruby.

If you are wondering why lot of people think that ruby is cool, I again highly recommend “Beyond Java” by Bruce A. Tate.

http://vikasnetdev.blogspot.com/2007/06/perfect-storm.html
Vikas Kerni
Saturday, June 09, 2007 6:48:02 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
How about using the “excitement” to cure the “overwhelming”? Ruby may have the answer for the “tremendous challenges for application architects".

Rocky, in your arguments, you are assuming there is a lot of “new” stuff, I understand that you need to do that for billing purpose ;-) and you totally deserve that -- they never sufficiently count the quality of work. However, I really doubt that you are overwhelmed -- Isn’t it you who emphasized that CSLA can take an almost-free ride on all those? Nothing from M$ can be "new" to CSLA -- CSLA is way ahead of M$!

My point: M$ is brain-dead. To cope with the brain-dead stuff from M$, you must have a right vision that is way ahead of M$. Once you do that, once you have a right vision, you can deal with those brain-dead stuff with confidence – finding a hack is not that difficult, the difficulty is to know that you really need a hack; and to know that, you need a vision.

Now, the tough part ;-): CSLA is pretty good and it has its niche. However, to improve it, expand it, and to compete with Castle/springframework, I believe you should study more Ruby, and create an ALSC – it is time to do that, Rocky, you can create another framework, so that you do not need to consider backward compatibility, too scary even for you ?

survic
Monday, June 11, 2007 8:31:46 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Ruby the "perfect storm"? Pul-lease. That dogpile of steaming ka-ka is so far removed from being anywhere near being truly useful, roaches will rule the earth before widespread adoption of Ruby occurs.

Guys like Fowler totally miss the point. Yeah, he's a great guy or whatever, but he totally, totally has zero idea why platforms like Java and .NET took off. He's never gotten it. He thinks it's about being "agile" or some such BS having to do with people typing code on a keyboard. It's nothing of the sort.

Ah well. I guess him being loud and proud drowns out the quiet people just making things work - without Ruby...
foobar
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 10:22:32 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Hi Foobar,
First time when I decided to investigate Ruby, my thoughts about Ruby were very similar to you.

Disruptive technologies are often not “better” when they start out -- in fact, they are often worse.

http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/05/14/oreilly_wwdc_keynote.html


Having tried my hands on applet, how could one justify those numbers of hours and resources being spent to build applets or swing applications? But it didn’t stop Java from emerging an enterprise server-side language.

I don’t think there will a perfect storm like Java and hence hard working quiet people should pay more attention towards disruptive technologies


The factors that changed my opinion in last couple of days are

1. Every software architect worth his salt has couple of blog posts singing Hallelujah to Ruby on Rails.

2. I read “Beyond Java” by Bruce A. Tate.

Bruce defines the legacy the new language has to be embrace in Chapter 5.

1. Portability – Virtual Machine
2. Internet Focus
3. Interoperability
4. Enterprise Integration
5. Database Integration
6. Transaction and Security
7. Buzz
8. Open Source
9. Economics
10. Approachability
11. The Killer App
12. Language features like Dynamic Typing, Code blocks and Continuations, Rapid feedback loop, user interface focus, Dynamic Class Model


He has then two chapters on Ruby and Ruby on rails which leave readers in awe and shock effect who are new to dynamic typing language.
Vikas Kerni
Wednesday, June 13, 2007 1:11:09 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Frankly alpha geeks code in haskell or erlang or scheme or some such academica exotica (where many of the features in c# 3.0 come from btw). Ruby is an ad hoc scripting language used by fashionable web developers. Using this kind of tech on anything other than a social web site should get you fired. Google for "Ruby Sucks" (over a million hits).
David Thompson
Tuesday, June 19, 2007 2:47:25 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
I sit here in my office with literally piles of books, laptops and computers. On my desk are books and articles; they are open to chapters that talk about LINQ, WPF, XAML, C# 3.0, WWF, Spring.NET, Enterprise Library 3.5, Domain-Driven Design for .NET, SOA, BizTalk 2006 and WCF, just to list a few. I have several instances of Orcas open with projects in three different .NET languages (C#, Chrome and VB.NET). I complete the exercise and test questions; try to write meaningful programs so that I develop better (deeper) understanding at higher levels of complexity.

On another machine I have Dice and several other job boards up; I see many companies moving to .NET 3.0, WPF, WWF and WCF and they want experienced folk to come to them and, IMHO, work for pennies. I have been working like this since the release of .NET and other related technology and I do see the light at the end of the tunnel, yet more new technologies just keep coming as I'm just getting comfortable with a mere handful of new stuff; it is very exciting and at the same time I think to myself, “Where can I find more time and energy and sleep?”

I agree Rockford - it is not about the lack of excitement at Microsoft or about the many of us that work hard to extend our ability and skill to learn and master the new; it is because of the amazing possibilities put forth by the new and innovative that I spend so much time and energy and money learning these new and wonderful technologies. It is just so much and it is coming and moving so fast.

I’ve been in the software development business for 26 years and consulting for nearly fifteen years now and never before have I had so many new categories to pick-up and become practiced and proficient in. I re-double my efforts, try to eat better, say in the gym and get rest. With my clients I try harder to teach and mentor and then move on to the next task.

I thank Microsoft for doing their part by re-thinking, extending, exploring and inventing; if I want to stay in the game – to keep reaching for the prize and to make that contribution, then I have to re-think, extend, explore and invent.
Darrell Thurmond
Tuesday, June 19, 2007 8:37:55 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
It is difficult only when the things are brain-dead. To make it live again, you need an over-arching vision. CSLA can be it. Castle can be another one, sadly, perhaps a cooler one. One indicator? Sam Gentile is digging into castle now!!

http://codebetter.com/blogs/sam.gentile/archive/2007/05/29/castle-microkernel-windsor-resources.aspx

survic
Monday, June 25, 2007 7:53:55 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Get out while you can.... I went back to Powerbuilder. :)

"You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave!"

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/eagles/hotelcalifornia.html
Mike
Friday, July 06, 2007 10:15:38 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Wow. If I had a dollar for every acronym that was mentioned in this article, I could retire and not worry about any of it. Wishful thinking.... :)

I have been writing an appication for my company for the past 3 years. It is a mashup of all kind of things. Contact Mgr, Purchasing Mgr, Inventory, Engineering, Sales, blah blah, etc. It is written in Access (as FE) and SQL Server (as BE). A good chunk of the company runs on this software and everytime we turn around there is something else that can be added in.

A few months ago I got the bright idea to port the app (Access is too limited) to .NET (VB) and so, I started to learn. And learn... and, well you get the idea. I stumbled on to CSLA and thought that is was the cat's meow as I created a crude version of something like it in my app. Boy was I excited, I did something that a Pro Programmer did.

I have started looking into some of these technologies and scratch my head. My fingers are sore and my hair is gone and still I don't know which direction to point.

And so the question....
Being that you guys are the pros and I am a simple VB6/VBA guy, can somebody part the waters and help me decide which techs to concentrate on (and the order)?

Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks

Bill

P.S. Rocky, have you considered doing a webcast or 2 on CSLA?? Something like 'CSLA for dummies'. I will be front row and centre!!! :)

Bill
Friday, July 06, 2007 11:32:23 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
I have done a series of DNR TV shows (dotnet rocks TV) on CSLA .NET, and they walk through the basics.

http://www.lhotka.net/Article.aspx?id=821f5536-52db-4848-8835-997d41cfeb34
Rockford Lhotka
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