I have to admit that I am once again amazed by the power of
Microsoft. I just completed my first Microsoft training course in
a long time … to learn the C# programming language. It was an
awesome experience.

I have a long background in developing software, starting with assembly
language, Fortran, Basic, C, and other languages. I never really
moved to Java, but knew that I wanted to learn a current object oriented
langauge. Over the last several years I have learned both Perl
and PHP, and these are impressive Open Source languages. When I
saw that the Mono project was getting going last year, I immediately
reealized that C# was the language to learn … from a C programmers
perspective.

After three days in class I now have a good understanding of C#, which
I plan to use for both Windows and Linux development. The Mono
project is the Open Source project to bring C# and .NET to Linux …
and obviously Microsoft has C#, .NET and their development environment
Visual Studio well established and moving forward. I will be
looking at Mono, but I realize that they have their work cut out for
them … Microsoft’s development environment is impressive.

I have developed in Visual Basic 6 on Windows for a long time, and I
found this to be a spectacular solution for developing Windows
applications. I was able to rapidly create a wide range of
applications over the years, complete with installers, with very little
effort. With all of this, I was spoiled when I had to deal with
text-mode development in Perl and PHP. I was really waiting for
this C# training … knowing that it was going to leverage a lot of the
same technologies.

Some of the core areas of Microsoft’s solution that I was most impressed with:

• Visual Studio .NET 2003 –
  this is a very impressive Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
  solution. They have done a good job allowing for a lot of
  customization of the development environment. Once I had my
  desktop arranged, it was easy to flip between the visual UI designer,
  and the various code modules. Help was always there, and the
  Intellisense code completion was great. I admit that I wish it
  would complete using the tab key, instead of the Ctrl-Spacebar they
  require, however it is invaluable.
• Database Connectivity and Development
  – it is beyond easy to develop complex applications that access a wide
  range of databases, and data sources. Within the Visual Studio
  IDE, most of the development can be done using wizards and simply
  dragging and dropping database tables from the Server Explorer.
  All of the code to integrate the data sources, and databases, into your
  code is just written for you. You end up being able to use the
  DataSet wizard to then create the DataSet. Again … all of the
  code is basically written for you … and you are left to focus on your
  core logic and functionality.
• XML Manipulation – so
  far, I haven’t found anything that I can’t do with XML. In almost
  no time this morning, I was able to program an HTTP request to grab an
  RSS XML file from one of my blogs. I was then able to transform
  this XML file into a DataSet with one or two lines of code. From
  an XML file, to a set of database tables ready to be read.
• SOAP Client – ok … now
  this was just too easy. I simply located the URI for a web
  service that I was interested in. I actually searched the
  Microsoft UDDI directory through the integrated browser. I found
  a stock quote web service, and clicked the link to add it to the
  project. The next thing that I know, I simply have a new service
  with a couple of new methods that I can call. I then link the
  results of the SOAP request to a DataGrid … and can view the results.
• SOAP Web Service – now this was just too easy. I simply
  went through a Wizard to create the base service class, and then added
  a series of methods that immediately become web-services methods.
  As I added each new method to the class, the build process seems to
  simply re-deploy and everything worked.
• ASP.NET – now this was the final aspect of the course that I
  received today. I am absolutely blown away at hope simple it is
  to create complex sets of interactive pages.

Now … I am completely open to Mono and very interested in it’s
success … however I now have a model product that they are going to
have to beat. Visual Studio and Microsoft are at the forefront
of development with their offering . I’ll post about my
further experiences … and my experiences with Mono!