I am writing this blog entry using Windows Live Writer in Windows 7 beta on my Sun xVM VirtualBox running on my Apple iMac computer at home. What can I say, I love technology. I really don’t care who makes it. What I want to know is how will I, the company I’m working for, or my clients/friends/family benefit. I’ve been getting paid for web related programming since 1997. Professionally, I’ve been paid for working with Sun Java, Microsoft .NET (C# & F#), Microsoft Visual Basic, C, C++ , PHP, JavaScript, and ColdFusion. Personally, I’ve also explored other languages like Erlang, Python, Scala, Ada, Haskell, and ARM Assembly. My personal home operating system has migrated from Windows to Linux to OS X, and now to a mixture with virtual machines. I’ve deployed and administered machines and web servers on Linux, Solaris, Windows, on and off a cloud computing environment.
Microsoft headquarters is just down the road from me in Redmond, WA. However, Java has paid the bills for the majority of my professional career until recently. A little under a year ago I began using Visual Studio 2008 with C, C++, C#, and F# professionally all at the same time. It was a fairly steep learning curve all at once, but wasn’t too bad. Everything has its plusses and minuses. There are lots of things good and bad on each side when comparing Eclipse and Visual Studio, Java and C#, and imperative and functional languages.
I like to use the best software for the job, whether it be open source or commercial, free or paid, not always mutually exclusive. Microsoft has a dominant market share in the operating system market for enterprises. The desktop software I now maintain and move forward targets Windows. I must admit, that I’ve not always been a fan of Microsoft, but I really like what I’ve seen lately.
I think that making Windows 7 beta publically available is an awesome idea! I did not see it coming. I encourage Microsoft to continue allowing beta users and to publish additional betas. It will make the product much more stable, compatible, performant, and popular than Vista. I have been avoiding Vista, but think Windows 7 is pretty cool so far.