A new start
It is always a
strange experience when you start something new.After being a reader of many web
logs I decided that it was about time that I started writing one. First of all,
thanks to Scott for providing me with my new soapbox. He really has done a great
job of putting together an ASP.NET web logging solution.
I suppose I should start by introducing
myself. My name is Martin Spedding, I am English but I have lived for the last
14 years in Basel, Switzerland. I have been working in the IT industry as a
developer, consultant and manager for the last 18 years, so I can still remember
paper tape and computer memory being measured in Kb rather than Mb. It also
means I been through the mainframe to minicomputer to personal computer
revolutions as well as both ups and the downs in the industry
have developed in Java and with the
Visual Development tools from Microsoft,. This included many enjoyable years of
Visual Basic development. It was great fun for me to show people how much you
could achieve with a tool that was often derided as being a “toy language”. So
when it came to development with the .Net framework I was clearly faced with a
choice: should I learn VB.NET or C#. As my last project had been in Java it
really was a simple choice C#. Though I had really enjoyed coding in VB it just
did not make much sense to me to develop in VB.NET as it tries to be C# but with
twice the amount of typing. I was at the Orlando PDC in 2000 where Microsoft
announced .Net and I remember having a heated discussion with the VB.NET team
saying that in many ways they had killed classic VB and that VB.NET was
certainly not VB 7. Sadly looking at all the traffic I see on the Internet it
looks like many other people have noticed the problems I saw with VB.NET.