Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Okay, so I’m a novice programmer.

What may seem glaringly obvious, or extremely exciting, probably won’t do much for me. Learning how to write a text file? Now that was exciting.

But as I learn and grow in this competitive and fast moving environment I look over things that are now old news and WOW! It all comes clear.

.Net was where I started. So it was hard for me to see how wonderful it made life. As I try to wrap an unmanaged library the beauty of .Net screams out. Metadata!!!

If I need to consume a .Net based Web Service, Metadata tells me all about the functions, properties and other goodies I need to consume it. If I need to use functionality in a managed library, Metadata makes Intellisense possible.

If I want to access an unmanaged library, it’s locked up tighter than Fort Knox. There is nothing to tell me the names of the functions, let alone their signatures. I don’t know what it does or what I can use it for unless I troll through documentation or find source code that uses it.

I guess I’ve had the easy life as far as becoming a programmer is concerned. With such a beefy framework and so much experience as far as programming is concerned, it’s like nuclear science. My grandparents had no idea what went into nuclear power, I learned it in grammar school.

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