Triple Threatening to Change My Prescription for My Eyeglasses

There’s a burst blood vessel in my left eye—the near-sighted one used to look at computer screens. It’s a small injury and as far as I know not serious. But it’s serious enough to underscore my years-long passion for Microsoft .NET technologies. My work with .NET in earnest is as about old as my daughter, my youngest child… about seven years. Only now can I (I as in my ego) can record the beginning of my journey with my .NET ‘triple threat’: WPF, Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC. Yes, my over seven years of work yields just the foundation of doing the work that most “normal” people will recognize as work. Here are some interesting points:

• Microsoft had to invent many of the technologies that make my intent clear and coherent (instead of fighting against the tide with ASHX pages and XPathDocument objects). The important ‘inventions’ are: LINQ, XDocument, ASP.NET MVC, WPF (XAML).

• Microsoft’s historical hostility entitled “not invented here” made my technical life miserable. The embracing of jQuery for example is revolutionary for Microsoft and should not be underestimated. I cannot help but whine about why it took so damn long for Microsoft to get rid of its collective prejudice and start looking around the world for true innovation.

• I am a writer, educated in the sciences, that thinks of his work as machine-readable data. Without tools resembling the ones sold by Microsoft, this mix of art and science would be a recipe for disaster. Microsoft is the best data management company out there—their solutions/tooling for small data management that can scale to rival Oracle shit is unmatched (thanks in part to the company-killing shark that Bill Gates was). Data management is not sexy or intuitive so Apple will continue enchant creative slobs (‘slob’ meaning a stereotypical flaky artist that does not keep track of their work—they have “assistants”) for decades to come.So, it’s late. I need to rest my eyes. The real big deal here is that my new .NET-4.0-era projects are released at CodePlex.com:

• Songhay WPF BiggestBox—this is my job-interview showcase for WPF that truly and authentically can be used by me as a learning/research tool (instead of a superficial, uninspired job-interview showcase).

• Songhay Silverlight BiggestBox—this is my job-interview showcase for Silverlight. It is also a real tool to be used happily by me to preserve my study of Silverlight patterns.

• WordWalkingStick for Office Word 2010—this is my writing tool for my writing tool. This Blog post …blah, blah, blah. I tried to sell this idea as CleanXHTML, which is still on sale (for Word 2003).

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