Staying up to date...

Since the technologies constantly keep evolving, I've started to read up on books regarding these new technologies. I've ordered the following book on Amazon.com to keep up regarding the latest ASP.NET technologies, "Professional ASP.NET 3.5 In C# and VB".

This "little" book contains 1600 pages about the .NET 3.5 technology for ASP.NET pages. I hope to get through it at a reasonable pace and understand what's beeing discussed in it. I don't foresee much problems with it, because it's in my field of interest and I really wish to devote myself to the .NET technologies.

During my interview with Digipoint (that's http://www.digipoint.be for those interested) I learned that .NET 4.0 is already in the make and that I appear to be running behind reagrding technologies. This only motivates me to learn the technologies faster and keep up to date regarding the .NET framework.

This book however is not enough for me. There's alot more technologies from the .NET framework that I wish to learn. Silverlight, Sharepoint and WPF to name a few. I know roughly what to expect with these technologies and what they're for, but the finer details currently elude me due lack of experience. I hope to start reading up on those books pretty soon so I can use this knowledge in future jobs and job interviews.

Back to the roots

...which means back to Belgium for me.
Been in Belgium now for a couple of days, as of thursday 29th of April to be exact, and I miss things from Germany. On the other hand I'm glad to be back in Belgium as well.

Today's post won't be about those things though. I'm currently semi active, looking for interesting positions but I honestly don't have a clue what to do. Going back to University all sounds great, but several people close to me said that experience is more valuable then knowledge, while other people say the exact opposite.

Personally I want to work with the C++ language, but I'm hearing from all sides that it's a dieing language in the current industry and that I should focus on the .NET environment. I personally have no problems with the .NET evironment, but I'm afraid that if I focus too much on working with the .NET technologies, I will lose my skills and knowledge regarding the C++ language, and that it will become a disadvantage when I finnaly have the required experience to apply for the positions in the gaming industry.

Which brings me to my second point. Alot of people mentioned that I should make small games myself or programs related to games. All nice and well, but I really don't see myself making such a things, due the fact that creativity isn't my strongest point. I don't mean to say I can't think up stuff, as I can be pretty scary in that, I just lack the design skills to make myself some images or 3D stuff. And I honestly don't see the point of starting up a small team just to get stuff going. The trouble it brings isn't really worth the effort at the moment.

Been trying to build up a modelviewer for WoW to analyze the files, but it's so difficult finding information regarding the way Blizzard build their files, and I honestly don't expect them to tell me how they did it...