I loved Frontpage, I used it when I was young (15?) to create an inordinate amount of websites that I ran on one of the IIS servers with Frontpage Extensions, and other doodads, on a computer in my house. That server software came with Windows NT 4.0, which I got in a package of Microsoft software (pretty much everything developer-related that MS sold) I got for free when I went to the MS dev conference in Phoenix (late 90's) because I thought it would be fun. I remember eating quail or some other small game bird at lunch and talking to the real developers who thought it was really cool that I was into computers and showed up at this fancy conference at 15. I don't remember barely any of the presentations, but I do recall seeing one ASP.NET presentation at the time showing an interactive page with a database and everything (whoa! it blew my mind) and I thought that the internet was going to be really cool someday soon after that.
I never became the superman techie that a lot of the folks here became after getting into computers that young, but this article reminded me of those happy days programming with a free version of Visual J++ (why god?!), so thank you.
On another note, as I looked up Visual J++, I read that it was sued out of existence by Sun in 2001, but Microsoft supported the MSJVM for J++ for security updates until 2007! Then, they created J# in order to give those developers a way to transition to .NET technologies, like C#, which was then supported until 2017. Can you imagine any other company supporting old, decrepit technologies like that other than Microsoft? I have a kinda newfound respect for them and their engineering culture of long-term support.
“Can you imagine any other company supporting old, decrepit technologies like that other than Microsoft? I have a kinda newfound respect for them and their engineering culture of long-term support.”
MS seems very willing to support things for a long time. On the one hand that’s a good thing but it doesn’t stop them from constantly cranking out new things and putting them on maintenance quickly. I would much prefer if they stuck to less things and developed and improved them over a long time. Especially in the desktop development area I simply can’t see a coherent strategy. Over the last decade we had WinRT, Winforms, UWP, Silverlight, WPF developed in addition to Win32. I like desktop development but I can’t recommend with a good conscience committing a long term project (in a lot of companies in house software gets used over decades) to one of the MS frameworks because there is a good chance it will soon be obsolete. It doesn’t really help when people say “but it’s maintained” if your chosen framework doesn’t get any new features and there is no upgrade path to the latest framework.
I never became the superman techie that a lot of the folks here became after getting into computers that young, but this article reminded me of those happy days programming with a free version of Visual J++ (why god?!), so thank you.
On another note, as I looked up Visual J++, I read that it was sued out of existence by Sun in 2001, but Microsoft supported the MSJVM for J++ for security updates until 2007! Then, they created J# in order to give those developers a way to transition to .NET technologies, like C#, which was then supported until 2017. Can you imagine any other company supporting old, decrepit technologies like that other than Microsoft? I have a kinda newfound respect for them and their engineering culture of long-term support.