You heard me, my friends. I am now completely contaminated. I'm more tainted than a bovine with mad-cow disease. 'Nix that. I'm more tainted than a syphilitic prostituting leper. 'Nix that. I'm more tainted than a syphilitic, prostituting, leprous walking hamburger patty. That's right, THAT tainted. (Dear John Doe, if you are offended by my use of the phrase “syphilitic, prostituting, leprous walking hamburger patty” then I apologize dearly. Obviously, no offense was meant by it. If you happen to suffer from the condition mentioned above, then I gravely offer my apology knowing full well that you will most likely be dead within the next week).
Why am I so tainted you might ask? Well, because I've been programming in Longhorn and Whidbey all weekend. Now why this normally might be a very good situation, I ask you this: How am I supposed to return to work and program in ASP.NET 1.1? I feel like I will be going back to program, only with the aide of punch cards and duct tape (Oh, the hanging chads! Oh woe is me!).
Enough kidding. You may ask how I really feel. Well, how do I feel? Excited! I am greatly excited for the future that this group of technologies will bring us. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of places that still need polish. My favorite is getting a “method not implemented yet” exception. That's a great one! In preparation of developing the game I dropped a teaser about, I developed a simple chat application that utilized the new MessageBus namespace in order to build the client/server architecture. It only took just about half the day to get most of it running (and I have a feeling it would have been shorter if I was more familiar with the new platform). And Oh!, the beautiful generics. I am so glad to finally be using them. I am thinking of posting an article on the small application when I am finished with the next article in my game development series (no, I haven't forgotten about that series :~)). Below is a screenshot of the application I wrote (I apologize to all dial-up users out there for two large images in a row (speaking of, why aren't you on Broadband yet?!?!?!?)). It's definitely not a thing of beauty (insert your scorn for my lack of UI design skills here). Oh well!
Until next time, I'm Jason Olson and that's how the cookie crumbles! Ciao!