I think my beloved magazine, MSDN Magazine, is losing touch with reality. No, they've already lost it. For several years I've been drawing inspiration and great ideas from this publication, but their recent divergence to what's cool from what's practical is despicable. Nowadays the magazine is infested with trickery that has little place in the real world. Would you like to connect BizTalk with Office 2003 and, hey, let's have them communicate over SOAP via MSMQ! It's like a competition for some dubious award "The Smartest Pants In Town". What happened to the big names, like Jeff Prosise, Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, Dino Esposito, Morgan Skinner and others? These are people I've always been looking up to, and now they got caught up in the same frenzy.
Look at the topic lineup of MSDN Magazine 2004 (and these are taken from the covers. There's more inside each issue):
- January - Longhorn, Indigo, Avalon, WinFS
- February - Yukon
- May - Visual Studio 2005
- June - ASP.NET 2.0
- July - Visual Studio 2005, SharePoint
Do you see the drift? The two missing from this list actually have some sanity instilled in them. It appears to me that everyone has become such as expert in .NET 1.1 and Visual Studio.NET 2003 that we can just move on to greener pastures. I have my SharpReader poll ASP.NET Forums during the day, and seeing the sheer volume of requests for help and questions over at the basic-of-basics forum, Web Forms, I believe we're not feeding beginners the right food. There were 64 or so posts today alone! Some of them went without an answer. Newsgroups receive even more traffic than this.
One may call me a slow adopter, an enemy of progressive thinking. Tell you what: ever since 1999 I've had every beta of every version of Windows, Visual Studio, .NET Framework installed. I kept installing, reinstalling, resolving conflicts, etc, for years. And I loved being in the front row. It was cool. While in Atlanta, I went to pretty much every Microsoft developer gig.
This time around I'm taking it easy. Maybe I've matured enough. Maybe it's because I have much more responsibility with my current job than at any previous jobs (which is, actually, true) and I get to be a "decision maker". Rushing headlong into a slue of betas and technology previews is not a task for someone who has a busy daily job and has people and objectives to answer for.
It's impossible for a person with any social life left to digest the avalanche of Indigos, Whitehorses and Longhorns storming into your line of work. If there was a clear source of information out there about these technologies I'd be content. But there's not. Right now it's jerking back and forth.
My point is this: the hype is reaching insane limits. With these technologies not even in sight it's a waste of time (your time) and money (your money). We've got real jobs, real projects, real paychecks. We've been, in essense, abandoned in favor of what's still amorphous. The "content strategists" at Microsoft had better understand this or Microsoft will end up with a confusion and morale problem down the road. We need help here and now. Having said this, I'm off to ASP.NET Forums to hang out with folks who are still stuck in reality.
Also, I'd like to make a promise to my readers: no Whidbey, Avalon, Indigo BS on this site until they are solid and become a good investment. I'm not here to waste your time. I want to help with what's important in our everyday lives as web developers.
