DevLife

I recently replaced my six year old machine at work with a new Dell. Due to certain requirements, I’ve decided not to upgrade to windows 7, but I have been playing with some of the MS dev tools like the web platform installer and ms web developer express. Work is deciding on a new tech direction as classic asp is, well, old and useless.

Although my personal preference is to move to php for a variety of reasons, there is a focus on moving to .Net. Php runs well under dot net and ms has made significant investments into making php run really well. However, there has been some argument surrounding the use of C# as the language of choice.

In either case, I am pushing to use an MVC pattern codebase to provide better code standards. So I went and found asp mvc which plugs nicely into web express. So I download and install it with MS web platform software. This is where it gets good… The web installer starts up and while installing the mvc module, it offers to install:

1. Webcache for php
2. Php 5
3. Moodle
4 joomla

Among a few other bits. These packages are solid php offering dealing with CMS and Learning Management System. So MS is offering php as part of the who MS development experience! Doesn’t that seem a bit…odd?

To me, it seems like this is a bit of an admission that the path they chose is perhaps not the right one. This says to me that MS is offering the better language because there is some lack of interest in their tools and offerings.

This also tells me that PHP is the right language to develop in. Now if I can just make the required people see the light!

For some more laughs, the web platform also installed mysql, even though the original install of the web express package came with MS SQL Server.

Posted in: on the job by Bastien / Tags: MS PHP