Has anyone else out there grown disenchanted with the current state of the blogoshpere? I took 10 of what I consider some of the most popular blogs out there such as Don Box, Scott Hanselman, Joel Spolsky, Ingo Rammer, Martin Fowler, etc and read each of their 10 most recent posts. Only 12 pertained to something I was interested in and /or currently working on. I think that about 50% of the posts pertain to something that I
may be working on 12 or 18 months from now and the 40% is just a repost of something someone else all ready said.
Us normal people, if I can be termed normal, just aren't working with the coolest, newest stuff and while that bleeding edge stuff is really cool, I just don't care about it yet. I have been saying the same thing for a while now and it is my only complaint about MSDN magazine. MSDN is part of the marketing machine but I don't think that the marketers really know how developers work. They may do studies but unless you are setting in the cube farm with us, then you don't know how we work. And, the Redmond-ites are not typical and studying them may lead you even farther afield than just guessing.
How does reading about the next gen tools help me right now? It helps me plan for six or nine or twelve months from now and a serious adoption of a suite of tools like Team System takes that much planning but adopting .NET 2.0/VS2005 is a very easy decision to make. If it helps me automate a critical business process or solve a real world business problem or make our applications easier to maintain, I will adopt it. If it doesn't help me
right now then it takes a back seat to what is troubling me right now.
Some decent projects have been developed that effectively backport technology that is very new to what we are using today like Ingo's DetailsView control for .NET 1.x. However, the blogs and articles that focus on the technology that we are using right now get my vote. Am I being over critical? Maybe. But I am not envious of the toys of others. He who dies with the most toys still dies.
I feel that I know maybe 20% of the .NET framework really well, and another 40% remotely well, another 20% offhandedly, but I have never used the other 20%. That probably isn't suprising. I do want to have 40% in the first and 50% in the second before moving on to 2.0. If not, the newest features will get the bulk of my attention and that 20% that I have never used with just increase. It almost makes me sick to think about it.