The Project

The project of the moment is yet another file indexer. This one, of course, will revolutionize everything and make me rich because there is no way anybody else has ever thought to do this. That's irrelevant, though.

What is relevant is what I'm learning as I go. I wanted to learn about the latest C# features - the lambda syntax (rocks!), LINQ (sucks!), WCF (what is this supposed to be improving?), ASP.NET MVC (about f'n time!), and just generally come to grips with Microsoft's ecosystem's latest and greatest.

This includes open source stuff. So far, my experience has been that MS is pretty good at their core tech, but a lot of their other tech is second-rate to the OSS alternatives. Indeed, they are usually playing "follow the leader" - ASP.NET MVC for example. Nor am I wedded to the MS platform, in general; the actual index is Solr running in a zone on OpenSolaris.

Where I've been so far:

• PowerShell
  
• Windows 2008
• Visual Studio 2008
• Vista
• CodePlex
  
• git
• Solr
• Solaris

I've also poked around with F#. I like the language a lot, but it doesn't necessarily fit my target audience. I don't want to end up being one of few maintainers because I chose an esoteric language.

Why not Ruby, Python, or any of their associated frameworks? Well, I've done a bit of Rails work, and a lot of scripting in Ruby. I've done some in Python. They're great, and I will use them again in the future, I'm sure. Right now, I'm behind on MS technology. I don't think I do myself any favors by ignoring a significant chunk of the technology world.

The verdict so far? Not bad, not bad at all. I've let myself go through the "It's shiny! I love it! But it smells horrible! I hate it! With a little perfume, it's tolerable" cycle with a few things, and I'm okay with what I'm seeing.

Powershell, for example, is a genuine game-changer for the Windows platform - that hasn't kept it from pissing me off more than once. CodePlex sucked from the word "go" (I won't even bother linking to it - I'd rather spend the time writing a parenthetical expression of how I'm not going to link to it, it sucked so hard).

If you dive head-first into the MS Kool-Aid, you are taken care of quite well. The integration of everything is really nice. Yes, I've used Eclipse and NetBeans. No, they aren't nearly as good as VS2008. Seriously. It isn't until you step out of whatever usage scenarios that MS anticipated that you have any problems. (CodePlex is an example - I don't want to use TFS, it brings "suck" to "vacuum of intergalactic space" proportions.).

That's where things stand. I'll be updating in a bit, and we'll talk about Spring.NET.