I have a selection of songs that really make my day cool and I thought I would share them here. The first song is called Garden State feat Marcie. The lyrics are beautiful:

On the terrace of tomorrow
On the lawn of yesterday
The love that we’ve been cultivating
Is finally here to stay

Oasis in the moonlight
Will you see me through
With flowers growing all around
A garden here with you

All night
I wanna be with you all night

Temptation can be hard to fight
Lured astray by city lights
(But the garden grows)
(Yet the garden grows)
Sometimes we fight within these walls
We almost lost it all
(But the garden grows)
(Yet the garden grows)

All night
I wanna be with you all night
I wanna be with you all night
I wanna be with you all night

 

I downloaded the song from www.beatport.com and I must say its one of my favourites. I listened to it on ASOT 425 the first time.

Another song I really love is Longest road feat Lissie and I love the Deadmau5 one I bought on www.beatport.com:

Another of my all time favourites of recent times is In and out of Love with the vocals of Sharon den Adel:

See the mirror in your eyes
See the truth behind your lies
Your lies are haunting me
See the reason in your eyes
Giving answer to the why:
Your eyes are haunting me!

Falling in & out of love
In love, in love
Falling in & out of love
Your love, your love

See the mirror in your eyes
See the truth behind your lies
Your lies are haunting me
See the reason in your eyes
Giving answer to the why:
Your eyes are haunting me!

Falling in and out of love
In love, in love
Falling in and out of love
Your love, your love
In love, in love, in love

Why can’t you see it?
Why can’t you feel?
In and out of love
each time.

Why can’t you feel it?
Why can’t you see it?
In and out of love

I keep keep runnin’
I keep keep fallin’
Let it fade away.

Away away away away
Oh Let it fade away.

 

It has more than 60 million views on www.youtube.com:

I could go on for pages and pages really.

Firstly PHP is just a web scripting language and can only be used on a web server for web development, that’s it. You cannot use PHP to develop Windows apps or Linux UI or Mac OS X UI apps. If you want to implement any of the classes you will have to most probably rewrite that code, which is not that great. Compare this to Python or C# and you wont have to rewrite your code, just create a class library (with C#) and re-use, re-use, re-use, re-use… Code reuse within a PHP environment is thus seemingly limited to a web environment.

The second reason why I will not use PHP is because there are better dynamic languages available, such as Python and Ruby.

The third reason I wont develop websites using PHP is because PHP devs seem to think that because the develop a site in PHP they are already building an SEO friendly website. What utter crap. There seems to be this aura around PHP that makes it look like you automatically get website awesomeness packed in. Lets not forget that the art of development on most platforms require the same disciplined processes. Whether you write unit tests for .NET or PHP – you still need to write unit tests. Whether you test websites written using PHP or ASP.NET you still have to test them in browsers – you dont get cross-browser compatibility out of the box.

The fourth reason I wont use PHP for development is because .NET offers programming features such as LINQ and Generics.

And more where will mine be in the near future? I was looking at Macbook Pros today and I am seriously considering switching over for quite a few reasons. The first reason is that I really want to get stuck into learning Python or a non-windows programming language, and it seems Mac OS X is a natural extension for Python. I’m not looking for a programming language alone though and would prefer a technology stack instead.

The .NET framework is a technology stack that stretches quite far, from desktop development, database development, web development and mobile development, and you dont have to learn separate programming languages for each. I dont just write code for web development purposes – I write whatever I need for a particular job. Windows Powershell seamlessly integrates with the .NET framework’s BCL (base class library).

It seems to me that because Mac OS x is a UNIX system at the core it would integrate well with hosted content on Linux- or Unix-based systems, which means that you become part of a technology stack. With my limited knowledge and experience on Ubuntu I was able to connect through a shell to a Linux-based webhost, and I was able to traverse through directories and files. This seems like a natural extension of the development environment to me.

A while ago I noticed that at least two Microsoft people left to work for Google and while this may not seem like much of an event I find myself questioning the platform(s) I use for development. At heart I am a curious and innovative person who will generally seek to use something to solve a particular problem, regardless of what technology it uses. I have also been guilty of some fanboyism with regards to things like Visual Studio and C#, but I too realise that being a fanboy of something tends to make you a bit ignorant of other things. I have for instance decided not to learn PHP simply for the reason that I dont like its syntax style, the dollars just seem to clutter the code and PHP is not such a widely applicable language such as C# or Python. You could write any type of application with either Python or C# – windows-based or web-based. I also seem to think PHP is not quite on the same level as Python or C# in terms of language maturity, but that is just an opinion.

Ajax is not new, its not revolutionary, but it has changed the way I view web development. Javascript no longer comes as a might-have, instead it comes as a critical part of any website application. These days I use JavaScript as the UI scripting tool of choice, and I try to steer away from doing to much UI lifting in my server side code. jQuery makes dealing with UI quite pleasant.

I have also, in the last year and a half or so, been coding without MS Ajax. I have let go of things like the UpdatePanel and the Script Manager and have instead come to do direct Ajax calls to .ashx, default.aspx and web services. It feels that when you follow this approach that you have much tighter control over the quality of the UI. So what are your options for making Ajax calls in a .NET environment? I would like to think that there are a few options that stand out:

• Direct page ajax calls – you can use jQuery’s ajax function to call .ashx and .aspx pages. I have recently started using the [WebMethod] attribute in my .aspx files to make calls, and what I like about it is that you can tell the page to output JSON, which automatically serializes the method’s return type. I have also used ashx files to do ajax calls and this worked well
• SOAP-based web services – an approach I learned last year was to use a javascript soap parser to parse soap-based web services. These were mainly .asmx services. You can configure .asmx services to return JSON as well
• WCF-services can be configured for SOAP or JSON but also use a REST-like approach

What other options are there for .NET developers when making Ajax calls?