Asp.Net Alternative
All of this talk about Asp.Net being a leaky abstraction and having an overly complicated page lifecycle, I have been considering looking at some alternatives to see what all the fuss is about. I am one of those developers who has taken the time to learn a lot about the page lifecycle and am fairly comfortable with it. I don't think this means that I should get too comfortable. I have to agree that the current model doesn't really promote good design and separation of concerns like it should. So here is my "alternative to Asp.net" list:
Language Of The Year
I am also very interested in the trend to learn a new programming language every year. Many people have decided to choose one of the new cool languages like Ruby or Boo. I was considering following suite until I watched this video over at YUI Theater. I realized that I have been using javascript on and off for over 8 years and I have never really stopped to learn it. So I have decided to make javascript my language for the year. Like many server side, compiled language programmers, I have never like javascript. Now that the tools for developing and debugging in javascript are improving I have decided to give it a fair shake. Visual Studio 2008 will even have intellisense for javascript! (how did this feature take this long to come about?) I think I will start my javascript journey by focusing in on javascript librarires - starting with Asp.Net Ajax and the Yahoo User Interface Library.
.Net 3.5
Lastly, there are is the huge learning opportunity that is .Net 3.5 which will become more mainstream with the release of Visual Studio 2008. I have already ready a couple of books on WPF and WCF but I also want to add:
That should keep me busy for a while. The hard part for me is not so much in the learning but in finding ways which I can apply new things to my work while still fitting in with the applications/frameworks we currently have deployed.
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