Technical Book Club: Code Complete - Your Location on the Technology Wave
Right now, programmers have it pretty good. Tools have evolved to the point where even pre-beta CTP languages have great environments to work in, and the community aspect of coding has been emphasized such that any developer has resources that they can turn to when they encounter some quirk in a language. Of course, there are still plenty of quirks to be found. This transparency and direct access to the pre-beta bits means that developers can get started with something like cloud computing with Azure, see if it does what they want, and be ready to run with it when the final bits are released. It also means that you’ll likely have to re-work some of your code when a better way to do something replaces the way you were doing it, or a security concern is raised that you then have to comply with.
My first project had a very tight release window. We were releasing a new version of another software that it would be bundled with, and that release date was set. My project was making use of C# 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 Express, both of which were planned for release within weeks of the launch date of the other software package. Microsoft had given a “Go-Live” license, which meant that while the code might change, and certain things be deprecated, it would still be available in the language, so nothing should break in the project. I kept up as best I could with the changes that were going to be made, and only had a few updates after they launched, most of which I didn’t strictly have to change, as they were only giving me warnings, not true errors. Overall, I’ve had a good record with working with pre-release software lately. It does require you to stay on top of things, though, and have a willingness to rewrite your code if it comes to it.
If you’d rather not take the chance though, there’s loads of languages that you can pick that are a bit more tried and true. Personally, I appreciate living on the cutting edge and being able to take advantage of the new features they present.
