I’m super-excited about ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6!

I first taught myself to program in the early 80s. I taught myself again in the mid-90s. Then I started OrcsWeb and spent more time do “systems stuff” (I’m both an MCSE and RHCSA) and “business stuff” (yeah, it takes a lot of time to run a business!). Now that I’m no longer running OrcsWeb, I’ve toyed with the idea of teaching myself programming again.

My first tinker into the space so far has been Swift for iOS development. I’ve also been kicking around the idea of learning Ruby on Rails. But honestly I’d love to (re)learn .NET. I’ve looked into it, then I abandon the idea. Then I look into it again, then I abandon the idea. Why? Well, it’s just so freaking complex. The nice thing about RoR or Swift is that it-is-what-it-is. You learn it and go. With .NET there is always the question of Webforms, or MVC? Or maybe Razor? Do I use ADO.NET, LINQ, or maybe Entity Framework? Or something else? And those questions are just the tip of the iceberg. Some might say “just pick one and learn it” but I’d hate to invest time and energy into something that might go the way of Silverlight.

But, now it seems that many of my concerns have been addressed with ASP.NET 5 and MV 6. According to the almost-always-red-shirt-wearing Scott Guthrie, the latest version of .NET is a huge step forward on many fronts – including the concerns that I just mentioned and that have keep me from embracing the stack. I can’t wait to see how things play out as the technologies continue to move through their development cycles and into production-ready format.

I also need to determine the best way to learn it now. I’ve always been a tinker-with-it-until-you-learn-it kind of person, but it would also be nice to find a good bootcamp option to just quickly ramp up within a couple of weeks and hit the ground running. If any of you know of any good .NET5/MVC6 bootcamp options, let me know in the comments section.

Happy coding!