I had just installed Visual Studio 2005 on my workstation. And I needed to do some rapid application development. There was no time to come up to speed. So I fell back on the framework that I was most familiar with. That is the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC). Almost all of my Windows application programming has been done with MFC. It proved to be beneficial when every second counted towards completing an application.
But this was not the point of installing Visual Studio 2005. I heard somebody say that, even if you have experience with Dot NET version 1.0, you are obsolete. And I have not even reached that point yet. I am wondering if it is even worth getting into the Dot NET framework at all. I have a rapid application development tool set, albeit an old one. The new is that there is a new version of MFC out for Visual Studio 2008.
There may still be some application for which Dot NET is the best tool to use. So it would be best if I at least learned the basics to be able to tell which technology to use. It seems like this skill would help on interviews as well. Everybody is either into or going towards Dot NET. I met a developer that needed some expertise in my client's particular domain. He was impressed with my C# book library. I told him I just played around with it and found it similar to Visual Basic. He told me that F# was more hard core, and was something I should look into. Too bad I know little about it.
Time to hit the books and documentation. I have the IDE. Now its time to get to work. Good luck to me. If in the end I discover that this Dot NET business is all hype, at least I will have done the research myself and formed an opinion. I hope that Microsoft has not come out with a new methodology by then.
