The future of winforms?

robotCocks said:
Chill out idiots eh?

Talk about "thread hijack"

OP you need to get into web - the desktop is dead, mate - the closest thing to it these days with a future is native mobile. Learn both - then you're sorted for the next few years.

Its all web/mobile with cloud now
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Well I do a mixture of web and desktop development but I am stronger in the desktop sphere purely down to experience compared to web. Although I have been doing web forms for several years and last 18 months using webforms with Telerik's asp.net control suite.
 
davetherave2 said:
Well I do a mixture of web and desktop development but I am stronger in the desktop sphere purely down to experience compared to web. Although I have been doing web forms for several years and last 18 months using webforms with Telerik's asp.net control suite.
Click to expand...

then it's time to put the desktop knowledge into the background, and concentrate on web front-end, but without tools like Telerik.

if I were you, I'd solidify my knowledge of grass-roots HTTP, Javascript/JQuery and open web standards - everything else is a toolset, which is used to build upon. Do some training courses/tutorials/book & sample exercises/hobby projects (social coding?) to get your web knowledge up.
 
Well have started on my DI book and already realising how useful this is and I am only on chapter 2. Even in this early stages I have realised how poorly I have tried to implement DI and I need to start forcing myself to go down the TDD route and seeing how this will help me with implementing this appropriately.

I haven't started on the rest yet but I realising how little I know on occasions. I would consider myself a better than average developer but I admit I have large gaps in my knowledge and have tried to implement design patterns by happy coincidence rather than actually meaning too (again maybe not required but used with the best intentions). I then think back to the products that I am soon to develop/re-engineer I think this will make my life and the rest of the developers that I work with easier to support my products.

I have access to Pluralsight through work so I am going to start working my way through the design patterns course they have on there as well as a number of other courses that will help me to be a better developer. I think it is a constant battle to try and keep up to date and I guess I am now reaching the point in my development career where I have to finally specialize and become a full time web developer and learn as much as I can about the associated technologies that surround it.

Right time for some more reading and see what else I can learn. :p
edit: One other thing does this potentially mean we are looking at the death of the right click context menu? what are the best ways to try and implement these in the web world or is this considered bad form these days?
 
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DanF - I have just got the art of unit testing as part of my presents from Santa.

topbanana - I agree that context menus can be evil if used incorrectly but in the desktop world they do allow to reduce the multitude of options in the main toolbar (if one exists)

I have used it to great effectiveness to help our end users be more productive and simplify otherwise complicated actions/ nested options to action within a click or two at most.

I guess this is probably where MS were going with the whole Ribbon thing in word etc to try and remove people's reliance on context menus but it was a step too far to do such a revolution in toolbar design from the simple text one to the Ribbon.
 
Yeah context menu's are great when used properly in windows apps.

Another thing to think about with web design is the device people are using now, there's a massive influx of tablet and smartphone users to any public websites so they have to be taken in to account now when designing the UI layer. Again right click doesn't really exist in IOS, well I guess there's the built in 2 second click but you can't use it on a website.

Also check out responsive design, since there are so many different aspect ratio's and resolutions now any public websites need a fair amount of device testing. There's some handy frameworks for more internal or doc style sites that you can check out as well though.

http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/

and there's a bunch of custom theme sites for bootstrap as well just searching for bootstrap theme. We use boostrap for most of our internal tools sites now.
 
I think responsive design is less critical for the main system I am planning to rebuild as it will only ever be used on devices with desktop type resolutions working with a minimum of 1024x768 but I do understand the need to be able to adapt and cater for more unique/unusual resolutions.

As for bootstrap I have heard about it but not used it myself. One of new senior developers really rates it and I have kind of seen it in action but need to sit down and use it myself to fully understand.

From the quick look I have had in my html & css book responsive design is covered in that as well so I can see 2013 being the year of web specialisation for me I think and hopefully finally achieving senior developer level.
 
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