I have been a LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP) programmer for a decade. I have a lot of habits and experience in those technologies. I'm also a Macintosh person and have been since 1984. I despise Microsoft.
I was looking for a job. I found one writing an application type of website. It's supposed to be a new platform based on the best technologies, preferring open source. I got the job by discussing OO and MVC and ORM and AJAX and LSB and a whole gibberish full of things that I had been studying while I was out of work. An incredible opportunity to do something extremely cool.Imagine my distress when I found that the new system is to be written using Microsoft technologies.
The opportunity is too good to refuse, or perhaps more accurately, chicken out of. Lots of people really like .NET. I'm sure there are lots of ways in which they are right. In any case, I'm going to do it and, by the end of 2010, I am going to be a serious .NET programmer.
I've been working here for about six weeks, mostly studying the problem domain and helping to write the proposal. I've done some studying on the platform components and will explain that later. I have spent today installing Parallels on my Macintosh and then Windows 7 in Parallels. And then Visual Studio in WIndows. Then IIS. Amazing how many details and how many hours it takes. Anyway, I was trying to figure out how to do virtual hosting so that I could have some sandboxes to play with in my new environment. After a bunch of frustrated googling, I found that IIS doesn't do virtual hosts. It does "host headers." Same idea. Different words. When I run into a situation where there is divergent terminology, I often think that it would be nice if someone used both terms in an article that google could propose to me. Then I realized, I am at the very beginning of an interesting experience that begs to be documented. And so, if I have the patience, this will become a repository of my learnings as I add .NET, C#, ASP.NET 3.5, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET AJAX, Sproutcore, nHibernate, Visual Studio, and heaven only knows what else to my brain box. I hope it's fun.