For a couple of weeks I did not have any spare time to look into the share-point Implementation project. Last week, however, I managed to get some days free to look into the plans.
I am working with another technical lead on this, and he is taking some pressure of our back, so we can really study this well.
Last Thursday, I decided to take a look at the technology behind it… ASP of course!
I used to (more that years ago) build websites as a freelancer. As a freelancer, my budget was limited (budget : = @Number(“0″) + @Text(“€”)!) and I learned to develop using PHP, ans MySQL. This worked more than fine for me. Also Learning PHP to a level you can use it to connect to databases, insert data, retrieve etc. is not too hard.
And the best of all… It´s all Free!!
Now however, in the office I am working, the price of legal software is not important anymore, and on top of that, we receive the Microsoft Action-pack, with new releases and training licences. This opened up all kind of experimentation with MS technologies.
Last Thursday I installed a copy of Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express, with SQL Server 2008. Biggest surprise of all… Its a Free download! Combining that with the standard IIS Server which comes free with most windows systems, you have a pretty nice Web development platform.
Since the interface confused me a bit, coming from Domino Designer, I started watching the MS Training videos , and over the weekend I followed a couple of tutorials.
I found myself building a complete application by Saturday! To be very honest, I have always been advocating Open Source and Free software. However It looks like Microsoft is taking care of their low budget developers and it works! There are quite some similarities with Domino Developer (v7), even though VWD looks much more web-facing and using the toolbox is a real joy! also the whole data-layer architecture, makes connections with databases something I understand!!
Well… Ill stop now, before I sound like an Uncle Bill add.
