Old School versus New School

One of my last jobs at FSG was to develop a brand new application in PHP (my language of old, the one I started at FSG with) to handle several rather significant processes. I dutifully did this over a couple of weeks, but found myself constantly looking for functionality that I had come across in my C# tinkerings.

Well, I have been firmly in C# and VB.Net land for two months now, and FSG have stolen me back for a week to put my application live (it had been delayed from production due to third party issues - blame the DVLA!), and in the month and a half or so since I've been away from PHP my whole ethos has changed considerably!

Database access - Linq rules. Just about says it all really - authenticate against the database, create the object schema and ... use it! Nothing could be simpler. Going back to PHP and direct SQL queries is horrendous, as is converting objects into SQL for storage - the future is definitely with ORMs simply because it brings the database directly into code, no more distraction because of separation.

IDE - I never used an IDE with PHP, just stuck to plain old EditPlus, because that was what I liked. Since switching to C# and .Net, I have to admit that I was a bit daunted by Visual Studio at first, but after settling down with it I can honestly say that I never realised just how helpful a decent IDE can be in the development process.

Debugging - PHP just sucks at this, its 'echo' or nothing (well, 'print', but you get my point). An IDE with integrated debugging and code stepthrough saves so much.

Code 'prettiness' - with PHP its all in the php files, be them front end code or class files et al. Separation out to code behind just makes the process all that much cleaner.