Reading a few books on the trip:
Reality Coldfusion MX is an interesting book in "real world" application development with Coldfusion MX and Flash MX. It's making a compelling case for using Flash as a rich client. I hadn't been convinced .. but I'm warming up to the idea. We'll probably try some experiments with Oncalls next week. The hospital operators don't use a mouse. Their hands are always on the keyboard. If they are going to use Oncalls to look up who is on call .. they can't use the website. So the website is good for the physicians .. and for the schedulers ..but not for the operators. We've got two choices for the telephone operators: A Flash MX client, or a Windows .net application. So far, the .net application is winning.
Flash MX Actionscripting. Not so easy to read as Forta's book (but with fewer editing errors!) This book provides the cake tot he "reality" book's icing. It's the meat on how to do actionscripting. I never really took the time to learn. ActionScript is like Javascript .. so it's not too hard, but the whole "movie" metaphor is hard for me to adapt to. Born as a programmer in the early 1980's (BASIC, Pascal) .. I still have a hard time with object-oriented programming. Taking it up another level to think of my program as a series of "frames" in a "movie" is tough. I understand that it makes sense when I'm making an animation .. but it's hard to think of a web form as a movie.
.net user interfaces with C# I'm not a C# programmer. Not sure I'll ever be one. Dave works for me. He's a C# programmer. I need to uderstand what he's doing. I can't manage his work if I haven't a clue what he's doing.
I have a friend who is a manager at General Electric. He manages a team that develops turbine engines. He's a fluid mechanics engineer. He manages fluid mechanics sngineers. He and I were discussing the "joys" of management recently, and I observed that there is a high turnover of IT management. He wasn't surprised. "F=MA" He says. I get it. The domain isn't a moving target in mechanical engineering. IT managers have to keep up on technology.
