Isn't it obvious 6
As a Microsoft .NET developer by trade, I check the MSDN site once a day or so to see what’s new and to make sure I’m current with what’s going on in .NET land.
Microsoft often boasts that they “eat their own dogfood.” That is, they pride themselves on using their own software to build their products. Well, today on the MSDN homepage I found this link regarding the latest and greatest in .NET programming:
Allow me to make a few observations:
- Colors are horrible. I can’t really read all that yellow-orange text at the top.
- Notice the domain name has “vb” in it (because Visual Basic is the center of Microsoft’s world, I guess).
- I finally realized that the yellow text is talking about VB6. Apparently VB6 developers are their primary audience; or at least, we can conclude that VB6 programmers are most likely to be wowed by this site.
- I guess they’re promoting something called a Discover Pack, which is “free”, but only if you first watch three webcasts or complete a Visual Basic (there we go again) learning course.
I presume the site was developed with Visual Studio 2005. And this is the best they could do?
When I started learning rails, the first site I ever saw was rubyonrails.com.- Normal color scheme
- Easy to guess domain name
- Welcoming to anyone from any background even if you don’t know Ruby yet
- Great screencasts I can watch anytime I want without having to earn the right to watch them.
I’ve noticed that Rails sites tend to look pretty nice, too. Most of them are easily developed with a free IDE or even without any IDE at all.
I wonder which web toolset makes it easier to develop professional websites?
Yes folks, I’d say the difference is obvious.
I don't think it's the Rails framework that makes people design better, but the design culture associated with the Ruby on Rails community.
37signals for example, are well known for the user interface design -- usability consulting was what they were doing more before basecamp.
you can't really say the same for .NET developers.
It is true, at Microsoft we "eat our own dogfood", although I must be honest and say I've never heard of anyone using VB.net at MS. Pretty much all the .Net devs I've met use C#. Far and away though, 90% of the people using VS 05 (myself included) use it only for C++.
I do agree however, that many of our designers are not exactly cutting edge, in either their graphic skills or the tools they use. Many probably also feel they're developing for a corporate audience, rather than developers, which is probably why the 37signals design would not work for ms.com :(
Ever since picking up rails tho, I've given up on the old days of Dreamweaver and table-based layout, and I handcode all my HTML and CSS as carefully as I do my ruby code!
Interesting observation on the "vb" prefix.
I thought MS were still busy getting people out of Java, and leaving the VB6 crowd behind in their heaps of messy legacy code.
I have bought into the "dagger stab legend" of what VB.NET did to the VB6ers of the world.
This might be something brought on later, perhaps too little, too late, for the VB6ers to come running to the northeast.
I really don't see what the back-end framework has to do with the front-end design.
You know how 37signals talks about good writing skills as an indicator of good programming skills? Same kinda thing here. It's cultural. No, the front-end design of a marketing web site does not necessarily reflect what the back-end framework has to offer. But, to Jeff's point, it matters that there does seem to be a lack of passion (or skill) in building a web site - about a tool that is supposed to help you build web sites.
I had and the fix I found :)