Defining My Role and Our Technology

My primary role for our organization is the Lead Developer. While we have other people on staff that do graphic arts and some minor database development and document publishing, the realm of implementing the technology that drives our business is mine.

Last year we upgraded our hardware and software to utilize Microsoft Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005 to drive our websites, co-located at a local hosting facility. Our web sites are our primary assets, and we use them to establish ourselves as an online media presence and provide a publicly accessible data network of professionals, sort of like the MySpace of our industry.

Apart from some occasional design elements passed to me at my request from our creative department - another department consisting of just one individual - I'm a stand-alone coder and our sites are a huge plumbing project of mixed classic ASP/VBScript and ASP.Net pages. Since the start of my employment here 5 years ago, I've re-written all of our pages and replaced nearly all of our legacy systems with our own home-brewed web projects.

But just like cleaning house in a large mansion, by the time we have repaired, modified, and rewritten the various pages and functions that make up our online presence, it's time to go back to the beginning and start over again.

I have already rewritten our main Internet based networking application and newsletter mailing systems (cores of our business) in ASP.Net 2.0 / VB. We are beginning to use AJAX in our online applications and I'm excited to begin learning SilverLight also to present rich media to our audience.

I use Visual Studio 2005, and more recently Office 2007 and Windows Vista on my workstation. Although there were a few hiccups with an Access ADP we use for back-end administration purposes, I would say that I love both Office 2007 and Vista. I found tweaking Vista's security features was necessary to allow me to function without ripping my hair out, the new GUIs in both Windows and Office are impressive. I like change, I was getting bored of running Win 2K on our workstations anyway!

In coming blog posts I will go into much more specific detail about the challenges facing my position, but I wanted to begin by giving you an idea of what type of development environment I work in.

Your comments are welcome.