One day, the Microsoft Engineers in Sunny Redmond just went bonkers and built a solution so powerful, so economical, so user-friendly, and so portable... it makes you think like it's the end of the world.
Obviously, I just came from one of Microsoft's Marketing talks aboutVisual Studio.NET and I am still ogling over its gazillions of nifty features. Truth be told, Microsoft has come of age and the new Visual Studio .NET 2005 is definitely a living testament of its thrust for usability and portability and everything else in between.
Back in the days when programming is a tad boring (it still is, to me,at least) and you have to cut and paste snippets of codes back and forth between files just to get the similar output you want from the other website you made 2 years ago, Microsoft comes out with this new application framework that answers every programmer's woes about redundancy and coding nightmares.
Truly, this new Visual Studio.NET is aptly described as .NET on Steroids. Coming from a *nix advocate like me, that is a sure shot compliment (Damn, I deserve an exam voucher for this!). But really, attending the demo on Visual Studio.NET this afternoon made me say "Wow!" over and over again like there's no tomorrow.
All my friends on the other neck of the woods are probably going to ditch me for this, but guys, Microsoft deserves a credit for this one. Really! What they have is simply an application framework which rids you of the time spent coding stuff which could otherwise take you ages to complete, and allows you to just drag and drop these things onto your development space like never before.
Imagine creating a team blog site with moderated permissions per member, all on your own, with very limited programming knowledge. By limited, I would say you know the theory but you've never done it your whole life. (Read: Experience=NULL).
How many days would you normally spend, scratching your head over your code to allow you to create a login screen and connect this to a datasource and what not? My best guess, a day and a half or more for a novice programmer. With Visual Studio.NET, you can simply drag and drop your login screen onto your development template. The framework uses ADO that allows your login screen variables to connect automatically to a database for validation - no more extra coding needed (not even fixing the design of the text boxes!) You may however, need a little bit of encryption to ensure security of your data but that definitely demonstrates how Microsoft has tailored this application framework for dummies (like me!).
With the users' preferences in mind, the Visual Studio.NET also has a feature for web containers which allows a user to freely customize how he would like his page to look. Take the case of Yahoo Mail or your Friendster, it allows you to customize the color and look and feel of your page, what your preferences are for the extra info like weather, stock quotes and news and what not (whether you want them there or not, or if you want them just about anywhere on your browser). Visual Studio.NET's framework extends this even more by putting in an extra drag and drop functionality. Now, isn't that absolutely cool?! Drag and Drop on your web browser!!! Like Stanley said, "a 6-year old can figure that out!"
Just when you thought nothing can get better than this, Microsoft knocks you down one more time with their answer to the perennial problem on caching. Many have tried and failed, and Microsoft admittedly accepted the fact that Active-X has eventually went down the same path that "crapplet" (read: crappy applet) went. But theVisual Studio.NET 2005 struts its stuff as a dynamic platform by showcasing its intelligence in a manner that just rendered me speechless. The issue with caching on old days is that it compromises data integrity. Ok, this is a little difficult to explain now, but let me try.
In the past, the way the internet worked was that, when a user tries to access a website, an application server communicates to a database and sends data to a local server. When the user accesses the website for the first time, it stores this data on a local server and the next time the user tries to access the same website, it immediately pulls the data from the local server, without connecting to the database to validate if there were any changes. Chances are, when the database is updated between the time the user first accessed the site and the second time the user tried to access it, the local server doesn't recognize any changes. In the new .NET framework, it has a very intelligent mechanism to trap these changes. Every event happening on the database consequently sends a trigger to the application server. Provided that certain changes were made prior to the user's next attempt to access the same website, the application server validates the cached information on the local server and consequently updates this if it is not current.
If I base my opinions on the things I've seen and heard from the demo, I would probably say this is the next best thing to CHOCOLATES --- Oh yes, I am a self-confessed chocolate addict, so shoot me! Now, I can't wait to get my hands dirty on the new Visual Studio .NET. Until then, I would like to suspend judgment on how well it really works for me. But let me leave you with something you can play around with (This is absolutely free, so jump at the chance!) -->
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/.
