Posted: March 11th, 2006 | Author: Michael R. Murphy | Filed under: Business, Career, General | No Comments »
Great site,lotsa’ good info but what happened to the “dailies”? From Feb 23 to March 1 is hardly every day. Give us more!!
That’s a comment recently left here by a visitor. It’s true that I’m averaging a post about once a week lately.
It seems like suddenly I’ve become insanely busy. My recent recognition means more and more people at work work (my day job) are asking me to participate on their projects. I think there may be a queue (sorry,but I love that word).
I’ve also started picking up more freelance work. Most recently working for a musician in Syracuse on a site for his CD release party. I hope to complete that in the next few weeks or so. I also have a number of other projects in mind and various stages of completion. Stay tuned!
Lastly,I keep writing that I want to learn C#. Every few months I talk about it. Unfortunately I still haven’t managed to get past half way through the first chapter of the book I bought.
It’s even more unfortunate because for some reason I now get a phone call or email about every other day from somebody looking for a .NET developer. That tells me that learning C# will pay off like crazy (learning for the sake of learning aside) but I just can’t seem to find the time to focus on it. There’s just too much opportunity for paying work.
The point of all this is: I know I’ve been slacking on posts lately. It’s not because I’ve gotten lazy. Keep coming back and I’ll keep writing. Okay,nevermind,I’ll keep writing regardless.
Posted: March 1st, 2006 | Author: Michael R. Murphy | Filed under: .NET, ASP, C#, Design | 1 Comment »
Although it’s been put on the back burner many times over the last few months years,I’ve committed myself to learning .Net. After talking with quite a few people,I decided that C# would be my best bet.
So I bought myself a book and compiled a list of online resources. The next step would be the IDE. Visual Studio is anywhere between $500 and $2500 depending on the version. Ouch.
I don’t remember how but luckily I stumbled upon the Express area of Microsoft’s web site. As the name suggests,they offer Express (read free) versions of quite a few of Microsoft’s development products such as Visual Studio and SQL Server to name a few. While I’m not sure about SQL Server,the drawback of Visual Studio Express is that only one programming language is supported per version. I’m sure it’s short on other features as well but that seems to be the main difference. There isn’t anything preventing someone from downloading an Express edition for each of the programming languages they develop in but I imagine they’d quickly tire of switching back and forth and pony up for the commercial version which supports all of them under one IDE.
An added bonus (in addition to the free part) is that registering the product grants the developer access to another area of Microsoft’s site where you can download two dozen or so free icons from IconBuffet,about 250 royalty-free images from Corbis,and development related ebooks. Not a bad deal.
I imagine that as I get more into developing in C#,I’ll spend the big bucks for the commercial product. Until then,I intend to post here about my development progress and what I think about Visual C# Express.
