Web Development has moved from being a simple hobby of mine into my profession. At work, I am a professional ColdFusion developer. At home I still play, albeit, not as much as I once did. I believe in many ways I have plateaued with ColdFusion. At least as far as my job is concerned I have definitely plateaued. There is no up, no growth from here.
As a result I find myself looking in other directions. After attending a Microsoft Firestarter event on November 8th I have decided to pursue .NET as my next programming platform. Yesterday I purchased a book of ASP.NET with C# and am hoping to put together at least a “Hello World” site today. If all goes well I will slowly begin to move all of my sites over to ASP.NET.
At the center of my personal projects is a new web game. The game takes a lot from Sundog and Freelancer but brings it to the web. Basically, the idea is to have a fully fledged space trading game online. Hopefully, I will be able to implement some more exciting elements of the game like combat with something like Silverlight. I think I will avoid Flash for this since I can program a Silverlight application in C# instead of having to learn ActionScript.
Somewhere tied up in my game is my tired old Blog/Wiki/Forum project that never seems to get off the ground. Perhaps .NET will make that a slightly less horrible project to take on. At this point however my game itself is going to take precedence. I have started thinking about breaking it up into several smaller parts so it will be easier to handle.
later,
-junc
