Initiations at LVX Lodge went beautifully on Saturday. Along with a great batch of candidates and a stellar set of officers, the Lodge's cantankerous air conditioning system met the challenge of a Valley summer day quite well. This is in marked contrast to last summer, when we nearly killed most of Grand Lodge by hosting their annual meeting in our space during 120-degree, high-humidity weather at a time when the air conditioning was just barely moving air, much less chilling it.
Meanwhile, I've managed to learn enough about VB.Net to untangle the Premiere Psychics site. This is a relatively new business started by a friend, and they got started on the wrong foot with their website. It's nice being able to combine helping them out with learning a new set of technologies.
I went into this project prejudiced against Microsoft and all its works, but I resolved to keep an open mind and see if perhaps the common wisdom in the Java community was mistaken. I have concluded that no, the common wisdom is spot on. While .Net does some things much better than any Java toolkit (e.g., "hot" deployment of code updates to a running server), the only IDE choice you have is Visual Studio, and Visual Studio works extremely hard to force you into bad design and coding practices. I routinely have to override its default choices to make things work the way a web application should. Now that I've worked out how to do such overrides, I can make it behave without much effort, but I shudder to think of all the bad code being generated by less experienced developers. Oh, and the server side engine (ASP.Net) takes valid markup (under HTML 4.01 Transitional) and rewrites it to make it invalid. That completely ticks me off.
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