Taking The Plunge

In recent months I have begun recoding our Filthy Lucre Investment Club web site and associated systems, pretty much from scratch. The database has been redeveloped, the middle tier objects are just about finished, and some previously dodgy vbscript scheduled tasks have been replaced with a much more stable Windows service. It's looking good.

So, now I'm at the stage where I want to redevelop (and enhance) the website, which is where most of the changes and rework will inevitably take place. The decision I have to face is whether to stick with coding it in VS2003, or take the plunge and use VS2005.

VS2005 looks great, and has lots of features which I know will save me much time - Master Pages, for example, will make life much easier than the convoluted basepage system we currently have to code manually to achieve the same results. I'm eager to get my hands dirty with VS2005, and use some of it's new features in anger, on a real-world application, and I know that using it to redevelop the FLIC site would achieve this. But on the other side of the coin, it's obviously still beta software, so I fear I'll get so far down the site creation process before finding that some functionality I require isn't yet implemented.

What to do, what to do?  I think on balance I'm going to have to dive in head first and start getting used to 2005, even if it does have some quirks. By the time I've finished the FLIC redevelopment the RTM version will probably be on the shelves anyway :-)