riddlermarc

<rant>

I’ve been thinking about the current crop of programming languages that currently abound, and I’ve come to the conclusion that PHP,RoR etc. are just a waste of time if you are really serious about learning something job wise. Too many kids leave school, buy PHP for Dummies and then proclaim themselves “a web developer”. Give them a look at something a little more proper and they’d run a mile.. it’s not just CSS and PHP out there in the Real World™ and they’d be stuck - write a framework in C#/.NET and make the transition from unique to Master Pages, anyone?

It also really bugs me when people say “SQL? Yep, grab a copy of MySQL as it’s free and the same as SQL Server” - of course it isn’t!

Technical differences in MySQL and SQL Server when it comes down to the ANSI SQL standard:

• MySQL does not support Triggers, SQL Server does.
• MySQL does not support User Defined Functions, SQL Server does.
• MySQL does not have Cursor Support, SQL Server does.
• MySQL does not support Stored Procedures, SQL Server does.
• MySQL does not have FULL JOIN capabilities, SQL Server does.
• MySQL has limited Import/Export capabilities, SQL Server has full support for Import/Export.
• MySQL has limited Transaction Support while SQL Server offers full Transaction Support.

I’m a complete fan of FOSS/non-MS stuff and I do know PHP and MySQL pretty well but unfortunately in the Big World out there you need MS SQL Server knowledge most of the time to keep abreast. I did implement some PHP into a site at work, it did fit the spec pretty well as it was to go on a Solaris box running Apache, hence no MS-based code.

</rant>

Right, my brain is obviously reaching that point of healing where it wants to learn something else. I was earlier reading on /. about Ruby on Rails and I wondered “so would it be a good addition to the skill set and is it wirth be bothering with - I already know PHP so another open sauce (as it were) language might be redundant?

I have no idea if we use it at GC, Alex and Andy are the non-MS boyz so I might point them to this post and see what they think..

Well, I have been running this for some time in a VM and it seems perfectly stable, I am considering upgrading my 2k3 server and running it live :/ I have been Googling to try to find the answer to the question of whether or not is will be upgradeable to the rtm release and I think it is - apparently the www.microsoft.com site is running it so I assume it will be!

Plus IIS7 is now issued with a Go Live license:

After months of preparing IIS7 for the release of Windows Server Codename “Longhorn” Beta 3, the IIS team is proud announce that IIS7 has reached a very high level of quality and is now ready for broad customer testing

Fingers crossed, all I have to lose is the weeks I spent getting IIS6 working properly under 2k3! I am looking to deploy it to test against, I’m sure we will end up using it at work and I am particularly interested in the Virtualization that will be coming soon after Longhorn is released..