Actually, I feel a bit duped.  Many years ago when web programming was all new and super flash, Microsoft came to the rescue with ASP which promised to help us poor desktop programmers program for the web without having to learn a new framework (or was paradigm the buzzword de jour back then?).

Interestingly, the more I work with nice simple frameworks like jQuery and MVC, the more I look critically at ASP.NET Webforms and think it is a really complicated answer to a pretty simple problem.  And this thought direction is contagious…now I’m looking at event driven programming and thinking about how it obfuscates the intent of the user interface code.  And how databinding never works first time, and would be much simpler if you coded it yourself.  And how ASP.NET update panels almost always result in page validation failures.  And how the enterprise library validation framework is hurting me on one of my current projects…

So, I’ve been putting it to the test.  The last couple of sites I have developed have been MVC2 and jQuery, Google Maps API, easy on the brain, light on frameworks, have developed rapidly, have been agile, have been well received by the client and have made me smile every time I’ve worked on them.

Am I a hippie?

Input Director – allows control of multiple computers using a single keyboard and mouse.  If you’re like me and hate reaching over to your KVM to switch between computers then check this software out.

Sweet Home 3D – a  an easy to use drawing package for designing house renovations / kitchens.   Great for visualization.

CutePDF – a printer driver for generating PDF documents.

Chrome – my favourite web browser (for now anyway).

Windows Live Writer – my blogging tool of choice.

WinSplit Revolution – a great wee utility for organising open application windows. I use it to size windows to cover just a single screen in my two screen desktop.