Just thought I'd put in my two-pennies worth of .Net discussion.
I've been using .Net for nearly 3 years now. Was VERY fortunate to be an official Beta-Tester of the product way back in October 2000 so it's like a second language to me now.
I haven't had any problems what so ever, the results it gives are more than enough for my work and the customers of the company I work for have also been taken back with comments like "I didn't think internet stuff could do that", "How is the program running of a web page then", "Well the screen shots look good, er, y'mean that's the program!!!"
CattleRustler is also right, c# is a damn fine language, although personally I've never got into it, but from what I've read, and the little experience I have had, it's a step up from Asp/Vb.net.
I'd seriously recommend anyone who wants to enter a career in programming to learn .Net. Despite what anyone thinks (I probably will get flamed for this!!!), Microsoft do lead the way in steering the programming market (having more than 75% of the worlds computing running on their systems and they have to really), and the next version of .Net and it's IDE (Whidbey), is even better.
You can program (on the fly) user configurations, so each visitor can have their own 'style' for your program, database handling is an absolute doddle (a few drags and drops, and you've got a full searchable, sortable, filterable database) and SOOOOO much more to list.
As a last sentance, from someone with 17 years experience in software engineering, DON'T be put off by
silly comments on what .Net can do. I hope CattleRustler and other users agree, that the majority of developers who says .Net is full of bugs, really have a problem with their own code -
a poor workman always blames his tools...!
~ J ~
