MSDN Magazine

Somehow, without meaning to, I have become an old programmer.

I'm not an old man, barely 33. But, I've been programming a long time. It's been 25 years since I typed out "Hello, World!" for the first time on the membrane keyboard of my Timex Sinclair 80. For the last ten, I've programmed both professionally and as a hobby for Microsoft Windows. Apparently, this makes me an old hand in this business. Very few of the programmers I worked with or knew through peer-to-peer technical support lists when I was starting program any more. Many have gone into management or changed fields. And, not to be melodramatic, but more than one has worked himself into an early grave building the infrastructure of this Brave New World we now live in courtesy of ubiquitous computing and the Internet.

I know that I am an old programmer because I find myself longing for the way things used to be with frightening frequency. That's not to say that I am no longer voraciously neophagic, only that my intense fascination with the new has been tempered with a desire to be able to do things the way I used to.

For instance, I miss being able to write ASP pages in a text editor like UltraEdit. The ASP.net framework is orders of magnitude more complex, functional, and robust than ASP. The downside of all this richness is that it's now nearly impossible to create an interactive web site without an integrated development environment like Visual Studio.net or WebMatrix.

Another thing I miss is Microsoft Systems Journal. I miss the clear sense of being able to map how far I was progressing as a programmer depending on how much I understood of what I was reading.

In the golden age of MSJ, I would read Visual Basic Programmer's Journal (now also gone, rolled into the horribly watered-down Visual Studio Developer's Magazine), Microsoft Systems Journal, and Dr. Dobb's Journal every month. I would understand about ninety percent of the first. If I understood more than one article in any DDJ, I felt like a genius. A real bellwether of my own understanding of programming was how well I handled the material in MSJ. Over the years, I progressed from maybe 30% comprehension to around 80%.

At some point, it was determined that MSJ was too esoteric and too high level to sell many copies (true) and that, as a result, the readership would be better served by rolling MSJ into MSDN Magazine (false.)

I have nothing against MSDN Magazine, but things just ain't like they used to be. For what it is, MSDN Magazine is top notch. But, it is far more general purpose than MSJ ever was. Where we used to get a full issue every month of the highest-end, most ground-breaking development technologies being used under Windows, we now get one article of that calibre if we're lucky. Worse, with the exception of DDJ (which rarely covers Microsoft technologies,) there's nothing out there at the level MSJ once inhabited.

What has replaced the high-end programming oriented content is a mix of good and not-so-good. The feature articles are uniformly well-written and informative for the level at which they were written. Data Points, the SQL Server column, is often worth far more than the cover price all by itself. And, it's rare that I find an ASP Column that doesn't teach me something new.

Comparably, the XML Files seems a bit forced some months. For the most part, XML is a fairly static technology. Dedicated a bimonthly column to it sometimes leaves eminently capable column author George Shephard reaching into a big bag of apocrypha to fill the pages. On the other end of the scale, C Q&A rarely gets deep enough into the admittedly vast subject to help many people other than the person whose question they're answering in any given month.

My biggest complaint about MSDN Magazine is that, because of its broad subject matter, there are often big chunks of the magazine that I find completely useless. For instance, I have no interest in developing for mobile devices. As such, the articles that cover that technology are wasted space to me.

Equally frustrating is an editorial policy difference between MSJ and MSDN Magazine. MSJ had a policy of not covering new technologies until they were actually released. MSDN Magazine never met an unreleased product it didn't like. Sometimes, entire issues are dedicated to technologies that we still won't be able to work with for months or even years, technologies which may not even be in their final form yet.

All in all, MSDN Magazine is the best source of regular information out there for Windows-based developers. But, it could be better.