Microsoft used to be my hero, ever since the day I turned on my first TRS-80 and saw the Microsoft Basic copyright notice.
For 20 years Microsoft was my whole world. MS-DOS, old Windows, new Windows. DLLs, ODBC, IIS, and all the rest of it. Keeping up with Microsoft was a chore. I'd learn to program DLLs, and by the time I was good at it, they were pushing Active X. Or I'd learn to use named pipes, only to find that everyone was using sockets. Everything was a confusing mismash of competing APIs, old code, new code, multiple ways of doing the same thing with no good explanation. Finding help in MSDN was a nightmare. Sometimes they'd just repackage or rebrand the same technology for no other reason than to confuse you. DNA? What the hell was that?
One day my boss asked me to do a project in Java. What an eye-opener. Everything made sense. Everything I needed was there, but without tons of redundant, obsolete material. Today I run Linux servers, program in Java, deploy on JBoss with MySQL databases. I ditched Visual Studio in favor of Eclipse. I love working with this stuff. I feel truly sorry for people who are forced to limit themselves to Microsoft technology.
For 20 years Microsoft was my whole world. MS-DOS, old Windows, new Windows. DLLs, ODBC, IIS, and all the rest of it. Keeping up with Microsoft was a chore. I'd learn to program DLLs, and by the time I was good at it, they were pushing Active X. Or I'd learn to use named pipes, only to find that everyone was using sockets. Everything was a confusing mismash of competing APIs, old code, new code, multiple ways of doing the same thing with no good explanation. Finding help in MSDN was a nightmare. Sometimes they'd just repackage or rebrand the same technology for no other reason than to confuse you. DNA? What the hell was that?
One day my boss asked me to do a project in Java. What an eye-opener. Everything made sense. Everything I needed was there, but without tons of redundant, obsolete material. Today I run Linux servers, program in Java, deploy on JBoss with MySQL databases. I ditched Visual Studio in favor of Eclipse. I love working with this stuff. I feel truly sorry for people who are forced to limit themselves to Microsoft technology.