So all of a sudden Sahil is directing technology at my company.

Okay, not really.  But his post yesterday about 1.1 vs 2.0 prompted me to take action today.  FUD be damned, we’re making the jump to VS2005/.net 2.0!  Now before you go thinking that I made a major platform decision based on one guy’s blog post, don’t go there.  I’m not that impulsive (although were I to base decisions on one guy’s input, Sahil would be on the short list of guys I would listen to).  I’ve been thinking long and hard for months about how much I wish we were on 2.0, and how much easier it would be were we.  I mean, I have a not insignificant project going on right now, and there are parts of it that were going to be coded (say for example, FTP functionality and application upgrading) that are existing as a basic parts of VS2005/2.0.  And it was making me sick that I was going to be doing what would essentially be throw away work.

But I read Sahil’s post, posed a question in comments that he answered immediately, and sat and thought a bit.  I decided that now is a better time than later to make the switch.  It just so happens that the project has been a little delayed and I’m not as far into it as I wanted to be.  But now that’s one of them there serendipity dealies because it just so happens that we have a RC version of 2005 and launch in November just a month and a half away, and the *very* minor work that will need to be done to existing code to upgrade now is just insignificant compared to a complete upgrade cycle on a finished project down the road.  And so, armed with my new conviction that it’s absolutely the right thing to do, I went to my boss, and my team, and we talked about it, and we decided we’re making the switch.

In the upcoming weeks I will be educating my team on the new features and productivity boosters in both VS2005 (the IDE) and C# 2.0 (the Language).  The nice thing is they can be exactly as productive as they have been already.  There’s no learning curve to using 2005, your old C# is still pretty much intact.  I know this because we’ve been using Beta 2 for NTeam development and I just wrote the same old C# I always have for my parts.  This means that you can adopt new features as needed and take your time learning them if you haven’t already.  So what I’ll be doing is making a series of posts to our internal team blog explaining new stuff like generics, iterators, partial classes, and all that other stuff that’s new.  This will solidify for me the new stuff that I’m putting in practice, and introduce the new stuff to those that haven’t been keeping up, because face it, when you’re busy in the trenches of your day job (it’s something I’ve bitched about before) you don’t have time to keep up with the new new thing.  So I’m making it my job as dev lead to keep up with the new new thing and educate my peeps.

In concert with this, I will be mirroring some of those internal posts to this blog.  Many of you already know this stuff, and so I’m sorry, just ignore it.  But I know for a fact that there are a lot of developers out there that just have not had time to learn it all.  Hell, 2.0 comes out in November, but people were blogging about generics and whatnot last year!  There’s a lot of folks that are just now (or will be sooon) getting to where I went today.  Now that the time is at hand, we can start focusing on the new.  So that’s my audience for these posts which for many will be so much old news, but for many others, will be information they can use when deciding what to do about upgrading their MSDN subscriptions come November.