Ionrock Dot Org

Yesterday I started learning C# which from what I can tell is a very nice language that really caters to all types of programming. I am very excited about using it for some web projects in which I have to use the winblows platform. I will say goodbye to cold fusion forever hopefully. But... the only snag is Visual Studio .NET. This IDE is often times heralded as the best development suite known to man but to be honest all I see is a big fat hog of a program that has entirely too much jargon and lock in features that prevent any newbie from learning to use the languages and .NET without taking extensive training. This was the same problem I had when I first started with web design. I began using Netscape Composer which I quickly could not get a hold on. After I actually read a little about html I started using Adobe GoLive which worked pretty well for me. My only problem with it was that it constantly added markup to my code. I thought that was just how it goes and let it be at that. When I started getting into php I said this adding code has got to stop once and for all. I decided to abandon GoLive and tried a number of smaller editors. They all had their good and bad points but I eventually started using Homesite (pre-dreamweaver version). This worked really well and I really liked it. I eventually got onto dreamweaver b/c I thought I would like a more up to date version of the homesite editor (which is in dreamweaver) and I found an editor that I liked. All was good, I had control, I refused to use any dreamweaver specific crap and I was pretty happy.

Now I am starting to mess with C# and I really just want to try out some simple things and see how the syntax is. Seems pretty simple but out of 4 hello world programs, 0 worked! This is pretty crazy. I finally did find one that worked and while the output gave me tons-o-info, it was way too cryptic and didn't really tell me much on how to actually code in C#. I haven't given up though. Thankfully Penn State has got enough money to offer a bunch of personal learning tools online to its students which I reaping the rewards of.

My reason for C# is for two reasons. One, I hate cold fusion and so if I have to develop on Windows I might as well do it in a language that looks like a real programming language and acts like one (classes, objects, etc). The second part is that I really want to learn to make gnome apps using Mono and gtk#. I think Miguel is right on with Mono and I want to be a part of it in the long run so for me it is C#. Wish me luck and if Bill Gates happens to read this: Bill, please make VS.NET a little more newbie friendly for all us Linux lovers who are giving you a bit of a second chance. Thanks.