What About Visual Studio and Visual Basic?

Wait a minute, what about Visual Studio? That last section didn't even mention it. And it didn't need to, because you do not need to use Visual Studio to develop, compile, deploy, or run Visual Basic applications. The entire .NET Frameworkincluding the Visual Basic compileris available for free from Microsoft's web site; download it and use it to develop and deploy applications that are every bit as powerful and complex as, well, Visual Studio.

The July 1983 issue of Datamation magazine includes a letter from manly reader Ed Post entitled, "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal."^[2] I highly recommend that you read this article, as it will help you quickly separate the real programmers from the "quiche eaters." And when you do, run away as fast as you can from the real programmers. Oh sure, they can reconstruct your source code from the obfuscated .NET assembly, but they will be useless on a team project using Visual Studio.

^[2] Datamation, Volume 29, Number 7, July 1983, pp. 263265. I also found the text of the article on the Internet by doing a search on the title. A similar version of the text, with only minor editorial changes, also exists under the name "Real Programmers Don't Write Pascal."

A "real programmer" could code any .NET application using Notepad, and it would run. Actually, they would use emacs or vi instead of Notepad (because Windows does not include a keypunch interface), but the results would be the same. They would growl as you blissfully type away in Visual Studio's elegant, well-designed, and fully customizable and extensible user interface. They would gripe and bare their cheese-cracker-with-peanut-butter-encrusted teeth at you while you use the IntelliSense and AutoCompletion features built into the Visual Studio code editor. They would consume another slice of quiche-shaped cold pizza while you drag-and-drop both Windows and web-based user interfaces.

Yes, the real programmer could generate full applications with just a text (or hex) editor and a .NET compiler, but you would get the glory, because you would be done in a fraction of the time it would take the FORTRAN lover to eek out his code.