taint

End of Day 2 with the ASP.NET MVC framework.

Taint Rails.

Taint regular ASP.NET.

Taint 1.0 yet - to be fair.

Taint a good developer working here either.

I'm probably being a little hard on myself here.  No, I'm not world-class developer by a long shot but I do pay attention to a few things.  It's an odd thing being caught between two worlds.  I consider myself a solid .NET developer and an OK Rails developer.  

I think the hard part is that when learning something genuinely new (e.g., Rails, .NET the first time 'round, Django) there's a certain expectation of difficulty - I mean, it's not like you've done this before.  But I think that working with ASP.NET MVC represents a certain crossover which doesn't bode well (at least for me) for a non-frustrating learning curve.

So it boils down to this: I know how to work in a .NET environment; I know how to work in a Rails environment.  ASP.NET is a [theoretical] merge of the two.  How could I not be successful?

Turns out, it's pretty easy.

The frustrating part emerged quickly.  For each (forgive the prose, I could break into a [vaguely] witty version of prose in code] but shall not) issue encountered, I could imagine how easily this could be done in one environment (Rails vs. ASP.NET) versus the other -but I'm not in the those environments.

The other part was an unintended side-effect of a rewriting a previously written application.   I'm experiencing an unfortunate non-acceptance of a learning curve (again).  I'm sure that all those now self-evident decisions that I made in my Rails app were not so self-evident at the time.  And probably hard won.  But because this is a .NET app, things should be easy.  I mean, all I have to do is implement the same feature in a language I'm, if anything, more comfortable in.  What could be easier?

And the other, other thing is that this is, above all, a beta version.  I think I picked up Rails at 1.0.  They (DHH et al) had already learned a number of things.  Perhaps not.  At the very least, they'd decided that things were OK enough to slap the 1.0 label against it.

The RC for ASP.NET MVC is coming up shortly (slated for sometime in January 2009) which means that a majority of the articles written are centered around various preview releases.  And because they're preview releases, there's no expectation nor promise of backwards compatibility.  So any number of articles/tips may (and typically do) include code samples based around features no longer in the codebase because, see, it taint 1.0 yet.

More to come.