Why I'm here.

My reasons?

What sort of world do we live in, when someone like me is starting a blog? It's still a hard question to answer, but it's best answered by explaining why I shouldn't start a blog. I barely passed English in high school, so my writing skills are average. I never studied at uni, so my programming skills are mostly self taught. I'm usually one of the last to know of cool technologies, and rarely dig deep enough to get the full picture of any one technology. And I certainly don't have inside knowledge or know people who work for Microsoft.

My background

OK, maybe I need to go back a little further. I did do some studies, acheiving a diploma in computer programming in Perth, Western Australia, where I grew up. It was a career change (or start), based mostly on my love for computers and self taught games programming in C++. I learned mainly from internet tutorials and a couple of books, about the time Doom was the PC benchmark game. I didn't keep any of that code, but I can safely say my programming sucked. It got slightly better by the time I was graduated, and my background was enough to assure high grades.

My first workplace was a small custom software house, programming Delphi applications. It was an excellent hands on job, covering programming, customer support, quoting, and database design. I was taught a lot, but I do feel like I'd never learned to program the best way. I didn't spend my free time learning, so my development was slow.

2 and 1/2 years later it was time to move to Sydney for work reasons and for Kirsty (now my wife and mother of my son Luke, 1, with another due later this year). Another couple of years was spent working for retailer Dick Smith Electronics again mainly in Delphi and interbase, mainly getting out of bad programming habits thanks to the help of an excellent programming team. After a while I finally found my own urges to learn more, and .net was the clean break I needed. I've still got my job with Dickies, and my last 3 years have been split between Delphi and Visual Studio.net apps. My works been great helping me to work more on the project side of things, but I've decided to keep pushing my programming knowledge further also.

So . . . my reasons?

Oh yeah, I knew there was a point. I've read plenty of blogs over the last couple of years, but there's no doubt, that subscribing to a few blogs recently filled me in a lot more on blogs. It's not just about experts giving up their knowledge for free, it's also about getting good information more widely distributed, because even if it's not your own work, I still want to know about it. It's also about having a central place to find out about a single technology... like Atlas.

Atlas is not even released yet, but already it's blown me away. My web programming skills are almost non-existant, mainly because programming for the web was painful compared with Delphi apps. .net changed that somewhat, .net 2.0 somewhat more, but it was AJAX that really got me interested. But then again, there were several small implementations for .net AJAX assemblies and support/documentation/tutorials was very low, so I didn't jump in head first. So I was thrilled to see Microsoft attempting an AJAX implementation, which is of course Atlas. Once you've put your first UpdatePanel on a form you're hooked. And even though documentation/support for Atlas is low at the moment, and there are problems with it (come on it's a beta), I feel like it's worth the effort to work it out.

And while I'm here I'll also put up interesting notes from .net Winforms apps, and keep an eye out for .net 3.0, which is shaping up to be a big step up especially looking at WPF and WPF/E. And given the current rate of development at Microsoft there will be plenty of things worth blogging about in the next year or so.

If you've read this far you've done well, thanks for reading. I'll be looking to start with some Atlas basics over the next few days, and hopefully not entirely embarrass myself or mislead people.

Yay, my first blog.