Web Development

Recently, I took the dive into developing in Silverlight 3.  I sat down, having only watched one 15 minute crash course video on it, and went to work developing a little version of Boggle.  I still have a few things to work out, but the main point is that I could just sit and do it.  Why?  Because I did it in C#. 

Some background: As I was going through school and they taught us Flash, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and some other classes, I started thinking that there had to be an easier way.  To use Flash you have to know ActionScript 3, to use PHP you have to know PHP, and so on to the point that for each technology you have to know its own language.  So, I took a look at the .NET framework, especially after taking one class in Visual Basic.  After not too much digging and research, I REALLY started to wonder why they weren't teaching this stuff in school...in Washington right down the street from Redmond, nonetheless!  I came to find out that they used to have one ASP.NET C# class, but it was disbanded the year before.  Why?!

As much as I loved hacking out 1000's of lines of code over the course of my time in school, I have since learned that I could have done the same in half the time and writing less code by hand if done in .NET.  If only I'd known at the time.  I think the great icing on the cake to that part of the story came in my final quarter in a Project Management class.  This class was the capstone to the 2 year program that I was in,as well as part of a scripting certificate, and by now I was hip to .NET.  Anyway, it started with 9 students: 6 PHP developers from our classes together and 3 .NET developers (I was one now and two others were there getting scripting certificates).  I found it quite easy to do all of the assignments in .NET with even the little experience that I had in it.  When the quarter's project came due there were only three of us there to turn it in, demonstrate it, and take the written final.  Guess which three were there.

Anyway, to try and keep this short, with .NET you can learn one language, such as C# as I prefer (or VB), and use it on many things.  Such as Silverlight, ASP.NET, WPF, SharePoint, and on and on.  You don't have to learn a different programming language for each thing that you want to work with.  Is it that hard for some schools to figure that out?  Well, I guess when most of the committee members would lose their jobs because they don't know .NET, then that makes sense, but oh well.  They just need to learn to be smarter. :-)