Whidbey Nomination

One of my customers was nominated for the Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) Ascend program. Even better they asked me to support them. The task is to migrate a JSP/Tomcat application to ASP.NET 2.0 using a lot of the new features.
Part of the ascend program is a special VS.NET 2005 training to prepare the participants for the work with the new tools.
As I missed the one in my area I’m going to attend in Milan/Italy in March.
By now I’ve already been working with the VS.NET 2005 Beta. I think the new features are great.
VS.NET 2005 will certainly be one of the the most productive development tools on the market.
A lot of code, e.g. for login or user management, written again and again for every application will be part of the ASP.NET framework. The framework is very extensible and open. Therefore it’s possible to embed this technology within existing applications.

I like J2EE technology very much, especially on the server side. But the client side rich clients and web applications seem to be the domain of Microsoft technology. In my opinion often the ideal technology mixture would be J2EE (EJB, JMS, etc.) on the server and .NET (Winforms, ASP.NET and of course Office) on the client. But only a few companies realize that as they prefer either J2EE or .NET. A lot of people are somewhat biased in terms of the “other” technology.

Be that as it may. I look foward to telling you in the future about my migration experiences and of course the pitfalls that every technology comprises.