.NET useful for something? egads!

June 06, 2007

Well I'll be damned, I actually found .NET useful for something today... At my "day job", I needed to generate a basic "site map" of the company intranet. While I prefer to spec these out in Visio so they are more aesthetically pleasing, this particular site is way too big for that to be an option. After determining that all I really needed was a recursive directory search, with some HTML formatting to make the output readable, I fired up Visual Studio 20051. Including quickly spec'ing out my design, it took between 2 and 3 hours to whip out a solution. I try not to be totally bias toward or against programming languages; I'm a big believer in "pick the right tool for the right job". That being said, it is not often that I find .NET is actually the best solution for my tasks (almost always for web development, I get the most bang for my buck via ColdFusion). However in this case, the 100 lines of C# code worked quite nicely, and didn't take too much time (or pain) to implement. :)
  1. Actually I started doing this in ColdFusion, and would have continued (requiring about the same amount of effort for my end result), however this particular shop is phasing out their ColdFusion usage (boo) and going to .NET. So in the interest of following the shop standard, I switched to the aforementioned .NET idea