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Well, I just hit a wall in my forward progress that I have been making over the past couple of days! I have just got a brand new computer that is perfect for development work. I have purchased Visual Studio 2005, which is on its way, and I have everything I need to get going on all of these grand ideas I have… or not?

I discovered that Microsoft FrontPage 2003, the HTML editor I was using on my old computer no longer exits on my new computer! I have the same exact Microsoft Office installed- MS Office 2003 Proffessional, and yet, no Front Page 2003! At first I thought that because I have 3 copies of Office (A student copy, a copy from Navy, and a copy from my old computer) that perhaps I just had the wrong copy of office— nope! I did find Front Page XP, but that is really of no use.

So I am HTML editorless, which makes it tough to do web design work! To do everything this weekend, I used notepad, which obviously gave me a lot of bug shooting to do because I type too fast for my own good.

So I said to myself- I just need to buy a new copy of FrontPage (although after more exploration, good riddance- FrontPage does the most annyoing thing by putting a thumbs.dat file in every single folder you are using). But Microsoft has given up on FrontPage and split it into two very different products- SharePoint designer 2007, and something called Microsoft Expression Web, which I guess is Microsoft’s attempt to rival Adobe Dreamweaver.

Well Expression Web is 200+ bucks, more if I pay in pounds. I had already purchased Visual Studio 2005 to do ASP.NET work as well as C#, but before I could go talk to Jaci about the software purchases, I realized- do I really want to buy into Microsoft this completely?

This led to a lot of angst about my path along this learning process. I have swerved into Microsoft-only technologies somehow, and I am wondering if I should try to escape while there is still time (although Visual Studio is an expenseve back down!), or if there is some good way to mix the two. I am torn, because I started learning C# instead of Flash or Java, and I really should switch back. Needless to say, the Adobe Web Design Premium suite (which contains photoshop CS3, which is another product I really want) is going to run me 1500 bucks- so should I switch now?

Well, now I am HTML editor program-less and clueless about what I should do next! See my next post for my learning path, and maybe someone out there can make suggestions.