Lagging Behind The ASP.NET World

Since we have not moved to Visual Studio 2008 at work, I have been unable to keep up with the progress in ASP.NET technology. I can't get into Silverlight 2.0 or ASP.NET MVC without Visual Studio 2008. 

I won't be blogging much here for awhile because I'm studying CakePHP and Flash which have nothing to do with ASP.NET. CakePHP is an attempt to bring MVC to the PHP community. Sometimes CakePHP seems half-baked to me. Sorry, I could not resist that joke. Actually CakePHP is a very promising way to rapidly prototype web applications. By studying CakePHP I'll get many of the concepts behind Model View Controller. I'm really not interested in architectural patterns used in software engineering but MVC takes a lot of the drudgery out of web development and even I can appreciate that. At the very least, you can use it to get a basic CRUD application up and going in minutes. CakePHP supports scaffolding and unit testing. I imagine it is based on Ruby On Rails and emulates many Rail features but I'm more familiar with PHP than Ruby.

I'm studying Flash because it is used for animation. There is a lot of material available on how to animate in Flash. Ultimately I may do all my animation in After Effects though because it is far more versatile than Flash. Flash animation is only the standard for online animation because its vector graphics make it light weight. However, if you are doing all your animation for video then there is less reason to use Flash. Flash is also used to deliver video on the Internet and I'm heavily involved in online video so I should learn all aspects of the technology.

There are some interesting features in Flash that designers don't seem to be taking advantage of. For instance, there is a web service component for Flash but I have not seen many web service clients done in Flash. You can also automate the Flash authoring application using JavaScript and I suspect very little has been done with that.

Over the weekend I went to Philadelphia for a YouTube gathering. I shot lots of footage of historical sites and colonial buildings. This gives me plenty of material to use for my editing experiments.