My 2008 Resolution: To Be More Eclectic

I’m not going to prophesy which technologies, tools and methodologies will bask in the spotlight in ’08. I only want to reflect on what I learned in ’07 and go from there.

Professionally, 2007 was a breakthrough year for me.

Ever since ASP.NET shipped, I’ve gone through the entire evolution of Microsoft’s “prescriptive guidance”: raw DataSets, strongly typed DataSets, “business objects”, and whatnot.

Looking back, it seems like two different worlds existed in parallel all along. One, run by Microsoft, is heavily focused on Rapid Application Development at the expense of sound architecture. A typical product of this era was the PetShop.NET travesty. The project violated just about every precept of good architecture, but was very RAD-compliant, so marketing folks loved showing misleading charts.

The other world is occupied by people behind such projects as MonoRail, MicroKernel and Windsor IoC containers, NHibernate, Spring.NET; the Boo language (what C# should’ve been); TypeMock, Rhino Mocks, JQuery, Subversion, etc. I am grateful to these people. This is where you learn how to build software. This is my focus for 2008, away from half-baked guidance, heavy-handed “solutions,” immature philosophy of software construction, marketing hype and stifling bureaucracy.

Along these lines, here’s a question I can’t quite answer to myself: if we’re shamelessly stealing so much from RoR—MonoRail, ActiveRecord, MVC, language constructs—why not switch to Ruby and RoR for web development altogether? I’m still struggling with this, but the ship has sailed.

> why not switch to Ruby and RoR for web development altogether

For me, it's about time. I don't have enough time to learn another platform's idiosynchrasies and libraries. Sure, I could probably whip up a RoR web app this weekend if I wanted to, but it would be a travesty in the eyes of "real" RoR developers. That said, I am wanting to learn about Ruby itself, but that is agnostic of the platform and I may end up doing so on the DLR.

I am *so* glad and super excited about the direction MS is (finally) heading with the MVC framework that I might actually be tempted to get back into web development.