This Week 2019-10-25

We have a client that has developed an impressive system in VB.net and C# along with a large number of SQL Server stored procedures. They also host their public infrastructure on AWS, which is a core interest of mine. I have not worked in the Microsoft stack since 2010 and many things have changed, but most have not. I suspect I should dabble in this more often but the stack is still Microsoft specific. Examples for Mac and Linux are few and far between.

If you are looking for a server side language I would recommended Python or PHP. They work pretty well even if your host OS is Windows. I would still encourage new developers to replace Windows with an open operating system. If you have a Mac I recommend installing VirtualBox and using all of that extra horsepower to work in a virtual machine running your favorite distro. If enterprise development is your goal, the latest JVMs run fine in a virtual machine.

Back to DotNet as a platform. Examples are lacking for how to put together a REST application if you do not need a database (WTF, nobody uses SQL Server anymore). I have found that everyone tends to use a single solution for a given problem. I asked why there are so many de-facto standards, looks like the culture supports the solution that has the fewest problems. Coming from a more vibrant community this "sucks less" philosophy feels counterproductive.

Spring Boot 2.2 went GA, given all of the depreciation this should have been 2.9. I suspect I will just generate a new application and port my application code to the new framework style. Migrating looks to be a chore now.

Most of my professional work is in shops with ReactJS front-ends. I started to (re)learn the stack a couple of months ago. AngularJS seems like the better solution for JVM applications but I need to go where the mass of our clients are going. I would still rather use a template system to generate actual web pages so the semantics of the web continue to work but I have three teenagers to feed.