OCDProgrammer.com

I have been an ASP.NET developer since I joined the team at Cintech in 2006.  I’ve been in the web form world and all the wonders of the PostBack page model since then. 

Then around the end of 2008 I remember hearing some noise about an ASP.NET MVC project released by Microsoft that got some bad reaction.  Talking about how it wasn’t a good start to MVC.  I never took the time to look deeper as I had other things going on in life, and was happy with my PostBack world.  Turns out this was a project called “Oxite” that is hosted over on CodePlex.

Then July of this year I took a job with a long time friend at Epsilon.  My friend is a Java developer, and through our conversations he kept telling me about this “MVC" way of doing web development.  About how it is so different than how he was being forced to develop on the .NET project we were working on together. 

The more he talked the more I got interested in learning about this new ASP.NET MVC that Microsoft had released.  Around this time CINNUG hosted a firestarter event going over ASP.NET MVC.  I took a Saturday to attend the event and learn some more.

In general I’m eager to learn more and put some of this in action.  This is when I went looking for that project that Microsoft put out.  Upon finding Oxite I see that it was basically a dead project.  The only thing I could find was a post on Erik Porters blog stating this in the comments:

October 08, 2009
Jeff, there is news coming about Oxite, but unfortunately I can't share anything until some other news happens. :( It's looking right now like that news is still a month and a half out. Really sorry! :(

Now this is on top of the fact that Oxite had not moved much since July.  Check ins, yes.  But nothing worth writing home about.  Then in the comments there was some guessing that Oxite was going to become “Orchard”, which was discussed as being a full featured CMS backed by Microsoft, though still being open source. 

Now I had high hopes for Orchard.  Since Oxite had been dead for months, I figured this new Orchard product would be ready to go when released.  I was stoked and waiting for it to be released.  I was all set to move this site to use the Orchard codebase.  When it got officially released I downloaded it, compiled it.. then ran it locally.  Wow, was I ever disappointed.  Orchard is months away from being usable, so here we are in the community with nothing to use.  From what my brief research shows me, at least a year after the release of ASP.NET MVC we have made very little progress in expanding this for people to actually use. 

As harsh as this may sound, I blame Microsoft and I blame the Oxite team. A person named Adam created a discussion on CodePlex stating the following:

October 12, 2009
Guys,

At the moment, I feel that Oxite is hindering developers from creating new ASP.NET MVC blog engines because Oxite is already there, on the other hand, the current official release of Oxite is missing load of features and cannot be compared to other popular engines.

If you are not planning to release soon or you are very busy, just declare this project as no longer supported to open the chance for other developers to start their own engines...

Regards,

Adam

I totally agree.  People don't want to waste their time recreating the wheel when there is a project already out there.  But here we are, over a year has passed and we have very little ‘real’ stuff to show.

Microsoft needs to get its act together.  Many great developers are abandoning the .NET platform for platforms like Ruby, and if you lose developers you lose the market.  Customers don’t care what platform people use, they just want their problems solved.  If those problems are solved and the developer chooses a non-Microsoft technology, then Microsoft loses.

Maybe Orchard is the answer.  Maybe six months from now this blog post looks like the most foolish blog post on the web.  For now, however, I’m still looking for the next big thing.  What comes after .NET for me professionally?  .NET won’t be around forever and being a fairly young man, I have to look toward the future to keep myself professionally relevant. 

Alan Stevens presented at CINNUG this month, and I have to say his presentation was powerful. 

Being a pretty devout Christian man I have heard a lot of sermons and presentations about things and this presentation was a top tier level presentation.  Very practical about how a career evolves. 

It is WELL worth the time it takes to watch the video, if you create a Vimeo account you can download the source file for offline viewing. 

I’m sure if you visit Alan Stevens blog or Twitter account he will let it be known when his PowerPoint file is online… check that, you can download the 66MB file here (but his link seems broke, so I’ll update if it changes). Here is the PowerPoint.

Again, well worth the watch.

So I made the trip tonight to the .NET User group in Cincinnati.  I've made it to a few, and hope to make it a regular event for me. 

Came in and saw my friends Andy Erickson (manager type) and Rich Rayburn (.Net developer, among other skills)... both in need of jobs due to their employer having some bad times.

This month was the last meeting for their membership drive so they had some very valuable swag (free stuff!).  An XBox 360, two MSDN Premium subscriptions (10K each), $1000 of free Max Technical Center training, and a few other items.  Unfortunately I didn't win a thing, though Andy and Rich did!

The meeting was on REST.  Basically a new way to do web services.  Was pretty cool.  Instead of calling functions you call URI's.  The code looks exactly the same with one small difference, an attribute above the function (similar to [WebMethod] attribute).  Wondering how I can implement this professionally because I think it could be useful. 

Finally got a tour of Azure, the new 'cloud' computing solution from Microsoft.  Can't say I get it. 

Rich and Andy are the first people I know really affected by the soft economy.  Not the fact that they are out of work, because I think some dynamics to their employment led to that... but because of a delay in finding new employment.  People are afraid to spend money.

Well that is my recap for this month's meeting.