So, ever since I got into the management side of things at Spacely, my tech skills have kind of plateaued. Damn mind-numbing management BS. I’ve been jumping back into the code lately — back into the ASP.NET side of things. Since it’s such a departure from the way of thinking you use with PHP and other open source tech it’s been difficult and frustrating.

I thought I might try to write about my findings and what not here. I’m sure nothing that comes out of my mouth will be profound in the sense that it’s a great ASP.NET revelation, but who knows, some noob out there might be having the same issues I am and might just appreciate hearing from another noob. Or maybe not. As you know, I don’t care. This is my brain dump, you’re just along for the ride. More behind the jump.

So the first thing I thought when I scratched the surface of ASP.NET was, “WOW! What a great way to do things!” Visual Studio, and the way they construct web sites/applications is pretty awesome to say the least (yeah, I can’t believe I’m saying that either). The idea of having a selection of languages that can work together to provide a software/web solution is pretty nice. You don’t find that kind of flexibility on the open source side of the house — at least from what I’ve found.

I know many of us are against the WYSIWYG way of coding up websites, but I think Visual Studio does a fair job of implementing it, without being too much of a burden. I’m still fairly new to this IDE, so that opinion may change.

To complete things, I found a nice article about how to integrate WinCVS NT with Visual Studio 2005. The only flaw in the article is it refers to the plug-in as free… Well, there’s a free trial, and then it’s $24. But, even still, that price is a gonga compared to Visual Source Safe. So, now my IDE is complete. Ready to collaborate. Ready to bang out some sites. So I get to it.

My first complaint is a small one. Master Pages. They are great, by design. It’s pure genius really. I mean, it’s not really a revolutionary thing, but to have it built into the design like this is awesome. Most of us in PHP have been using “Master Pages” ever since we discovered the include statement, but this implementation is really well done. Don’t get me started on Dreamweaver Templates. The only problem is that Master Pages can’t be put in the App_Theme folders. You know, where you’d expect to find a file that acts as a layout master.

Then it sets in… Oh yeah… I’m still using a Microsoft product… Oh well. :)