At the Mix n Mash earlier this week, I asked Scott Guthrie what his opinion was about developers having to deal with SO many new technologies coming out from Microsoft at such a rapid pace.
His recommendation was to pick what is core to your work, or what you are really good at or really vested in and then ignore the rest.
Easier said than done.
Even if we follow ONLY his blog, we have myriad technologies in our faces. It’s very hard to predict the future. I am currently “ignoring’ .NET 3.0 (WPF, WCF & Workflow), MVC, AJAX Control Kit, SQL Server 2008, a huge chunk of Silverlight. Granted MVC is far out. Volta just showed up. Astoria is plowing ahead without me at the moment. Surface is astounding. And there’s so much more.
It’s very frustrating because this isn’t Lays potato chips. The one I ignore may have been the one that will make a difference in my ability to support a future client.
What Scott is suggesting is akin to watching t.v. without a remote! 🙂 We’ll see how it goes…
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I have fun learning their new stuff, but who can really keep up with everything? I guess we do our best to pick what to focus on and try to keep a memory index of other stuff. Maybe it’s not a bad thing to have new knowledge be customer driven instead of trying to be prepared for every scenario upfront which is impossible. Reminds be of Joel’s post "Fire and Motion" from 2002:"Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features." http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.htmlCheers!
"akin to watching t.v. without a remote" What a novel (but accurate) way to phrase it!The alternative is having a remote, but with the "scan" button stuck, changing the channel every few seconds. At least with Scott’s approach you’re able to provide value.