Agree with you on all counts. My first serious foray into Linq is in response to EF and my first taking EF seriously came with 4.0. I tend to watch the 3rd party toolmakers, since they have a very strong investment in backing the right horse.
Ideablade convinced me EF is here to stay. Working with it for a while convinced me why.
As to wanting a job where I could learn on the bosses' dime - yeah, there are days when I really want the salary without the pressure to produce - but I've never wanted the boss that goes along with it, so I have been completely self-employed during my entire computer career - since 1980.
And I completely agree that especially with MS and its propensity to have parallel teams working in competition, it is important to be a late adopter in a lot of cases and the trick is to jump at the right time. I'm getting pretty good at knowing a public beta when I see one. I never wrote a client VFP app until 6.0 and then only after FoxExpress had done two complete re-engineerings. I got into .NET for client work at 3.5. Never took WPF or EF seriously until 4.0
I'm sure everyone is familiar with the story of the young bull and the old bull standing on the hill surveying the herd of heifers....
>>>But I see no reason not to begin my next app using what I have come to believe is a superior ( or at least more interesting ) technology when pretty much the only argument against doing so would be "Gee it's a lot of hassle to learn new stuff" <s>
>
>That might be one argument and I agree that if they mean it seriously, they're missing half the fun of this business and should be bank tellers.
>But for me, having wasted weeks on the rapid Linq-to-Sql ascent/descent in my short .NET tenure, I want to see MS invest some serious time and effort in new things before I do.
>For me that means a couple of versions with serious enhancements, at least.
>That's not an argument.. it's a survival strategy .. I can only waste so much time on dead ends.
>If it means passing up the latest and greatest for a while, so be it.
>
>Regarding the VB/C# choice..when I was learning .NET I started with VB till someone here said that the rates were higher for C# programmers.
>VB disappeared in a hurry.
>Some decisions are pretty simple, it seems to me.
>
>re: those people who learn on the bosses' dimes.. would you really want a job like that?
Charles Hankey
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
- Thomas Hardy
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
- Ben Franklin
Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
