This week has been back to school week. I am in class brushing up and being taught the latest in object oriented programming with Visual Studio .Net 2005. The teacher has been awesome. He’s funny, knowledgeable, and relates the concepts to real world activities. Us geeks, like to make fun of the DBAs and end-users of the programming world.

Oddly enough, my fellow classmates are all from the state agency that I interned at right out of college. The guy next to me asked my old boss about me and said the guy was even able to pronounce my last name. Wow! Didn’t know I left that much of a lasting impression. I spent most of my time waiting for things to do.

I even rethought some of the stuff I’ve done in PHP in how that I could use it better by using object oriented programming. It has always been one of those things that I just write code from start to finish, but if I had thought a few steps ahead of myself I could create a structure that would not only allow me to manipulate data, create search, find, update functions but turn around and use the code for the same data in a different fashion.

I’ve been like in nerd heaven all week. OMG.

What’s cool about Visual Studio .Net is that you can write in any type of code supported (C#, C++, Visual Basic – I think there are 43 languages supported) and you’ll use the same libraries to write methods to interact with databases, send emails, or even logging and they’ll be the same in any language you choose. The only thing that is different is the syntax. You can even have a Visual Basic program talking to a C# program with ease because each application is compiled and wrapped in the .Net module and then turned into machine code.

What is also cool is that when building an application now it doesn’t matter if it is a Windows app or a website the only thing that is going to be different is the UI (user interface), as long your business (logic that manipulates and finds the data) and data (logic that interacts with the database provides code to interact with the SQL server) layers are built correctly.

Like I said – nerd heaven.

It’s nice to change it up and absorb new information and drink free Mountain Dew for a week.