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August 29, 2006

Don't Miss Out!

My blog has moved. Please go to: http://jstawski.com/archive/2006/08/29/Don_2700_t-Miss-Out_2100_.aspx

Jonathan Goodyear, aka the Angrycoder, is presenting for Space Coast .Net User Group on Wednesday, September 20, 2006. His session is titled: "I Didn't Know You Could Do That With MasterPages."

10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 26, 2006

Presentation Download

My blog has moved. Please go to: http://jstawski.com/

To download the code and the presentation for my sessions at Jacksonville Code Camp, click here

03:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 24, 2006

Jacksonville Code Camp

My blog has moved. Please go to: http://jstawski.com/archive/2006/08/24/Jacksonville-Code-Camp.aspx

Please join me at the Jacksonville Code Camp, where I will be giving 2 sessions: Developing N-Tier Application with C#, MSSQL 2005, and XML and A Beginners Session To Ajax

07:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 09, 2006

Is Programming Going Away?

My blog has moved. Please go to: http://jstawski.com/archive/2006/08/09/Is-Programming-Going-Away_3F00_.aspx

I have found that I have a special interest in helping other people. Lately I have been getting more involved in the .net community by speaking at code camps, posting on the asp.net forums, and writing on my blog. I always liked to teach others and found it very rewarding to get a “thank you” or a “now I understand what’s going on” from the student, whoever that might be. This brings me to my point. I have spent a lot of time on the forums and interacted with a lot of others “programmers” (note the quotes) and I have found that a lot of times they really don’t know much about the platform they use (in my case the platform is web.) So, whose fault is it? Is Microsoft pushing “real programmers” away? How is this impacting programming?

          It started with Visual Studio 2002/2003 and then it evolved to Visual Studio 2005. Don’t get me wrong, Visual Studio is a great tool and makes work much more efficient, but one thing is efficiency and the other is doing all your work. With VS 2003 you can write a whole website with just learning how to use a tool. There is no need to know much about programming, but some basic programming is needed. Then came the 2005 era and Microsoft took the idea of efficiency to the extreme. I guess they wanted to show how fast you could build an application that they forgot we, programmers, get paid to program, and not only to know how to use a tool. If with VS 2003 you needed to know some basic of programming, with 2005 you could just go to a tool training session and have a website up and ready to deploy without a line of code (at least a basic website.)

          I remember when I was studying for my first certification for asp.net. I had decided to use a book from the source (I’m not going to mention the name of the book nor the publisher). I have to say I was very lucky I had years of experience with asp.net, because if it was for the book alone I would still be retaking the exam. The book concentrates in 2 things: how to use Visual Studio and learning asp.net. Doesn’t sound bad at all, especially if you need to pass the asp.net certification exam, but unfortunately it overlooks the fact that asp.net was built on top of an already well founded technology: html (and JavaScript). The book was something like this: you drag and drop a TextBox control and bingo, a weird looking tag <asp:textbox id=”tbText” runat=”server” /> becomes a beautiful, nice looking textbox on a web browser. Who cares how that happens and why your nice looking tag is now gone and you see something different like <input type=”text” id=”tbText” name=”tbText”>. All it matters is it works.

          Is this the programmers fault? I think not. I think this is what Microsoft has accomplished. You don’t need the basics as long as you know how to use a tool. So what is going to happen with the “real programmers”? Are they disappearing? I think not. Microsoft is not stupid at all. I bet they knew the effects of all this “everything works magically” technology was going to have on the programming community. Thanks to the “programmers” that know how to use a tool, the programmers that know what is going on behind the scenes can be considered experts and get paid like one.

          Until next time and happy Programming!

09:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)