Web Devs Have More Fun

Lately I've been working extensively with XML, XSDs, CSS, HTML as well as JavaScript.  Why all the technologies at once, you ask.  Well I am in this XML graduate course.  The class name is XML and it covers it from every angle.  Like I said it covered pretty much every aspect of it, to include DTDs and XHTML. I've been having a blast in the past few days.  I can't believe I have been coding for so long without touching much of these technologies.  I had forgotten how much fun all these things outside of C# were.

At first it was a little painful, I must admit.  The lack of familiriaty with the tools made me feel like I was handicapped at times.  I have built so much of a dependency on Visual Studio and the Plug In tools like R# that using plain text editors or other tools is quite laborious.

After I got past most of that pain and became more acquainted with the languages (XSL, XPath, CSS, JavaScript), programming became much easier.  I no longer kept the old code fragments (you know just in case the new one did not work).  I guess what I am saying is that going to into this journey, I cringed at the thought of scripting.  My fear of it went down a couple of notches during this journey.  I am still not crazy about due to the lack of test tools.

During this course I completed a couple of big accomplishments.

1. The creation of Feemo
2. A massive project that took an XML document through the entire use of XML technologies available from creating the XSDs to transforming it and displaying in HTML.

Hopefully, I can get to use some of these new concepts in some near future projects.  I can't say that there is not more I can learn in windows development.  There is always more about something that can be learned.  However, I would like to learn more about what the rest of the programming world is doing like json, javascript, ajax and so on.

So windows devs take heed if you are not learning any other technologies besides .Net please do. You are missing all the fun.  If you are learning other technologies please share your adventures with the rest of us.  I would be interested in hearing about them.  There is so much more out there than C# and Plain Old OOP.  Not that either are bad, but remember to expand your horizon.

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