First of all, I have to mention that this colleague has been a C and ASM programmer for most of his lengthy professional career, I won’t mention his name here but let’s just call him “Joe the Programmer” in light of current braindead naming schemes.

Joe the Programmer recently started programming with the .NET framework but yesterday came to a stop. When he was asked to help out with .NET development using ASP.NET, he took some time and to his amazement couldn’t find the ASP.NET programming language in the Visual Studio “new project” dialog.

At first this made me chuckle and I brushed it off, but then I realized he was correct to assume that there should be an ASP.NET programming language. After all, there used to be an ASP programming language although it looked suspiciously much like BASIC.

After explaining that ASP.NET is not as much a language but a technology, he went on his way and continued programming.

This all made me think that maybe the name, ASP.NET, is ambiguous, vague and might be a concept difficult to grasp for guys like Joe the Programmer. I just hope that he has a concept of OOP to go along with his newly found knowledge of ASP.NET.

I don’t like Visual Basic, yet in many Microsoft shops, VB is still being used especially in combination with ASP.NET. The problem with Visual Basic is that it’s not very strongly typed. Conventions are often thrown out of the window and Senior VB developers often hold their seniority as experience which, is more fiction than fact.

How many more times do I have to see Functions which don’t return anything and should have been declared as Subs.

Or: Variable 'XYZ' is used before it has been assigned a value.
Or: Variable declaration without an 'As' clause; type of Object assumed.

Ugh. You’d think that people with 15 years of development experience wouldn’t dismiss this kind of stuff and just do the right thing.