Power-coder.net

Well, it’s been a couple year hiatus, but it looks like I might be getting back into the world of web site development/design. The potential opportunity was presented by a buddy of mine who’s employer suddenly needs a bunch of web stuff done. The last time I did professional web development was right in the middle of the dot-com boom of the late 90’s where most web content was still static and mouse rollovers were the sign of a talented developer.

If I do end up going ahead with the project things will definitely be different with this go around. I’ve learned tons about back-end web programming in PHP and ASP.Net with all sorts of database systems. More recently I’ve gotten into XML and RSS Feed generation (all for a Top Secret app I’m building) which has shown some really cool abilities. Now that web development is more of a programming function than simple graphic design I am actually looking forward to getting back into the game again. There’s so many cool things that can be done in the web environment right, even the PostNuke system that runs power-coder.net does some cool things that I have really been able to learn from.

I’ll probably be doing most of the work in Dreamweaver for page layouts, then the PHP work will most likely be done in VI. It’s so much nicer to do the backend programming directly on the server instead of writing locally and FTPing up with every change (which is irritating as hell).

So, wish me luck, I’ll definitely be posting links to anything I create here for you all to see (and to send some traffic to my new clients). I have also recently posted links to some samples of my previous work in the Web Links/Sample Sites section.

As I’m sure most of the developer viewers are aware, Microsoft has officially released Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. I watched the Launch event and even though it was packed with buzz words and jargon ‘work faster, better results’, the demos were quite impressive.

The greatest thing to come out of this as far as I’m concerned are the express editions of each package, a completely free, even for commercial use, version of the software that are available now. I took some time last night and downloaded Visual C# 2005 Express and I have to say I’m very impressed in what it offers for a free software. I know I’m gonna get flamed for this, but I still say if Linux (or any other OS for that matter) offered a development suite as quick and powerful as Visual Studio, Microsoft would be in a much worse position than they are today. Anything that lets me work smartly and saves me time is good for me, plus the new refactoring tools are pretty sweet.

My current project (damn, far too many of those…) involves writing a DirectX app using C#. I’ve started moving it over to 2005 and .Net 2.0 and I have to say it works flawlessly. IntelliSense is much improved and much quicker to help you out without getting in the way, plus it seems to have a better understanding of code context which makes it freaky accurate, at least from my exprience so far.

I definitely recommend that anybody that does .Net development check out these packages, you’ll be happy you did.

PS: I’ll have some C# 2005 code samples coming soon!