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Right on. This is exactly why I started to actively avoid consulting gigs where I'd have to work with Microsoft technologies - whatever knowledge you gain has a
by projectileboy 16y ago
Right on. This is exactly why I started to actively avoid consulting gigs where I'd have to work with Microsoft technologies - whatever knowledge you gain has a shelf life measured in weeks, because they're constantly on to the next shiny trinket.
- glhaynes 16y agoMore than any other software dev I know, they seem to constantly be trumpeting that "this is a complete ground-up rewrite!" as if that were a good thing every time.
- kenjackson 16y agoThat's odd. It seems like most of the stuff I learned 20 years ago is still useful.
- vetinari 16y agoStrange. 20 years ago, the the hot Microsoft technologies were MS-DOS and Windows 3.0. Are you sure, that your knowledge of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List and VGA registers is still what current market demands?
- kenjackson 16y agoOK, 17 years ago. I learned Windows NT internals, and the Windows message pump, etec... Almost all of it still is useful today. Probably the only big discontinuity has been .NET, which has been going strong now for about 8 years. All the technology is pretty much incremental built on top of those two. I find it more daunting to keep with video game controllers than I do software development technology, whether on or off the MS stack. Not that I know everything, but I've never felt like I'd wasted my time learning anything related to software tools.
- vetinari 16y agoThere were some Microsoft technologies, that had better shelf life than other. NT, WinAPI, COM definitely belong there.
- contextfree 16y agoMicrosoft also has a habit of constantly changing the names and market positioning of everything, which can make it seem more mercurial than it is. (Not that they haven't had their share of truly ephemeral Next Big Things as well.)
- kenjackson 16y agoI'm kind of curious... really what were the MS technologies that you spent more than 15 minutes on(reading a Dr.Dobbs article) learning that went poof? I've learned over the years: Win32 Visual C/C++ COM .NET C# WPF T-SQL JScript ASP.NET Direct3D Visual Studio (the IDE) Windows Services I literally can't point to a book on my bookshelf that is related to MS technology and say, "that was a waste".
- vetinari 16y agoFor example: ODBC, ADO, DAO, OLEDB, ADO.NET... is seems, that there is no end to different data access layers. Technologies, that went completely poof: Hailstorm, Passport, VB6(!). Technology on the verge going poof: WPF.
- vyrotek 16y agoWhat happened to fail early and fail often? Just because they're a huge corporation doesn't mean they're not allowed to try to change the world with a new idea which might fail. They just have the money to try a bit longer before giving up than most companies. I think Microsoft does chase a lot of new shiny things. But they're really giving what the devs are asking for. I know, I'm one of those .Net developers :)
- smhinsey 16y agoI don't think ADO.NET belongs in that category. Even though it's not the primary method of data access in modern .NET software, to my knowledge everything else is built on top of it, and it's useful if you have some understanding of what's going on underneath the hood.
- 16y ago
- bmelton 16y agoPerhaps he's discovered a retro-consulting market.