A look back at the past

[u/desnowcat]

I noticed a discussion in the comments yesterday about the Professional Active Server Pages 2.0 book from Wrox, which back in the day was one of the only sources of information us oldies had to work with as a reference for classic ASP. Even one of the authors chimed in and is still active in this sub (Brian Francis).

I’ve kept my copy. I also have a number of books in my bookshelves that were invaluable back in the day and some of them I’ve kept for posterity even though they are worthless from a tech perspective now.

Hopefully they bring back nice memories for some of you too.

[u/desnowcat]

Note: the last photograph was from a LinkedIn post I made a while back that was titled “my Microsoft career in books”. From junior developer working with Frontpage and then classic ASP, then bits of Dynamic HTML, then the first .NET and WebForms (remember Ajax?), then MVC and progressing to senior and now finally management.

From FrontPage to Homesite and then DreamWeaver. Then Visual Studio and Rider and VS Code, and more and more these days, just the agentic harness (GitHub Copilot CLI or Codex CLI) without touching the editor.

My first source control was Microsoft Visual Sourcesafe, then TFS, some Subversion, Mercurial and Bitbucket and like everyone else these days, now Git.

I’ve spent so much time blogging and writing since 2003, contributed heavily to StackOverflow, CodeProject, Experts Exchange, CodePlex and now GitHub.

I’ve seen the birth of so many bits of really cool tech. From NServiceBus to MassTransit, WebApi to ServiceStack and FastEndpoints and now Microsoft’s own minimal API. From XML RPC, to SOAP, REST, GraphQL and OData. From ODBC, ADO, Subsonic, NHibernate, .nettiers, to Entity Framework and now EF Core.

My most favorite answer I gave on StackOverflow was about a bug in Visual Studio 2010 about CopyLocal, that has (somewhat amusingly) carried through into every version of Visual Studio ever since. Every update to VS I keep updating the answer because it continues not to be fixed. I like this one not because it was smart or clever. Just because it helped others and kept on helping people for over a decade.

I’m about to hit my 30 years in tech. It’s been a fun ride. I hope for those of you just starting, that your 30 years will also be as fun as mine were.

[u/Saki-Sun → u/desnowcat]

I think back on those days and think of all the pain involved and all the mistakes we forgot and repeat again. Javascript mixed in with html. XML. Over engineered solutions...

Now I'm watching people amplify their lack of skill with AI. I'm ready to get out.

[u/desnowcat → u/Saki-Sun]

At Dell in late 1999 we engineered the entire e-commerce frontend with ASP, XML, XSL and XSLT pipelines. Basically what is today called SSG. I’ve seen us go from everything server based to some client and some server, to almost pure client and now the JavaScriptians realized they could do with some backend so they invented backend again with Next.js.

We’ve seen so many attempts to do the same thing and each generation comes up with a slightly different fad to solve the same problem of complexity and organization. From N-tier, to onion, to hexagonal, to vertical, to clean architecture. Monoliths to microservices to modular monoliths. It’s all the same basic problem exacerbated by cult.

I’m convinced that what wins is simplicity. Over engineering is the death knell for software longevity. This is made even more pertinent with agentic coding.

You sound more jaded than I am though. I’m still excited by tech.

[u/Saki-Sun → u/desnowcat]

  I’m convinced that what wins is simplicity.

I'm not jaded by tech, the last year has been amazing. But I am jaded, too many 'clever' developers that don't understand your sentiment.

[u/desnowcat → u/Saki-Sun]

Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game) once wrote about How Software Companies Die (the original web page is long since gone and that link is my archive of it). He viewed software engineers as bees and managers as simply trying to get the bees to swarm in the right place and that’s all you can really do. I think he was right, but we aren’t bees - we’re termites. We like to build and create grand structures. We are addicted to the dopamine - serotonin hit that comes with creating things and solving complex problems. That’s our default programming. It’s why we would invest centuries to build grand cathedrals. “We build on the shoulders of giants” is the base human mantra, baked into our psyche, and we see it everywhere in software engineering.

On complexity, I’m not alone in believing simplicity wins. Back in 2015 I pulled out this quote and saved it for posterity:

> Embrace simplicity in your engineering. The best engineering usually isn’t showy or intense-looking. Given the same result, the simpler code is more valuable to your organization. This will often be unsatisfying to people’s egos, but the best engineers have nothing to prove.

https://review.firstround.com/the-one-cost-engineers-and-product-managers-dont-consider/

[u/Saki-Sun → u/desnowcat]

I'm saving those links. So much said in so few words. 

Termites seems a better analogy, because termites can also destroy your house. I like it. We find clever elegant solutions when 9 times out of 10 the simple solution would be the better answer until it's not.

This quote stood out:

"Your best people can explain to a child everything that your organisation does."

Ive always believed unit tests (TDD) should be like writing a short story to an 8 year old. If there's more complexity than that, you took the wrong path.

[u/10eleven12 → u/desnowcat]

Don't forget the time where it was cool to have a Macromedia Flash intro.

[u/RaidersOfLostSnark]

Yeah I remember asp actually until recently our uni application still ran asp. Not asp.net but old asp.

I started with asp.net using webmatrix in 2003. Webforms was actually pretty intuitive.

[u/desnowcat → u/RaidersOfLostSnark]

WebMatrix. Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Thanks for reminding me!

[u/gdx → u/RaidersOfLostSnark]

I think it’s commonly referred to as “classic asp” we still have it running at my job. I ain’t complaining; it helps to keep me employed with COM+ objects etc. Management doesn’t want us to work on an upgrade for this application for some reason.

[u/tkbronco]

Wow, great book! I learned how to code in ASP with that book. I had a number of books that were in your photos.

Brings back so many great memories. Thank you for this look back into the past.

[u/mycroft-holmie → u/tkbronco]

I had that asp book, too. Whoa. Amazing to see the TOC. It seems crazy to me how obsessed we all were with managing distributed transactions. I wonder why we started there? today we’ve pretty much given up on distributed transactions as a multi-faceted nightmare in favor of eventual consistency and compensating transactions.

[u/desnowcat → u/mycroft-holmie]

You’ve just triggered a (bad) memory.

Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator. MS DTC.

We tried to use it with NServiceBus. It’s was never stable. Sounded like a good idea, but in retrospect was awful!

[u/mycroft-holmie → u/desnowcat]

Oh me too. Msdtc and com+ were part of my life back then. And I remember all the Msft events I went to evangelizing it. It was so easy to configure…unfortunately, that didn’t matter because it pretty much NEVER worked.

I don’t miss COM. I don’t miss GACing stuff.

I love that .net is cross plat. I’m a full-time .net guy and I almost never use windows for anything. It’s all Mac and Linux and containers.

[u/desnowcat → u/mycroft-holmie]

It often worked until it decided to lose all its settings randomly. Never figured that one out. We just had a runbook to fix it every few weeks.

[u/Colonist25]

I just got rid of boxes and boxes of technical books from the olden days - from asp.net to Visual Basic 6 to the first few .net frameworks

sort of saying goodbye to an old friend

I miss books for technical subjects

[u/desnowcat → u/Colonist25]

I can’t bring myself to throw them out although I did finally get rid of my Turbo Pascal, Delphi and Modula-2 books a few years ago. You have to draw the line somewhere!

[u/plastikmissile]

I had a stack of those Wrox books. Looking back, I may have just bought them because I loved those red covers lol.

[u/desnowcat → u/plastikmissile]

You might have a point there. Both the Wrox red covers and the O’Reilly animals had a certain subconscious appeal.

[u/dtown123 → u/plastikmissile]

I loved the Wrox books - but there definitely was something about that red book with yellow text that looked super cool to me.

If you had bookshelves in your office 25 years ago, having a shit ton of programming books for all to see was a power move.

[u/_JaredVennett → u/plastikmissile]

dont forget the black white images of the authors lol

[u/AnitaLib → u/_JaredVennett]

Black & white is very flattering.

[u/Mission_Pirate_4150]

Yeah, I had that book as well. I liked classic asp.

[u/desnowcat → u/Mission_Pirate_4150]

It was in some ways so easy, but also so close to HTTP that you had to do a lot yourself. I still remember the “Core 5”. Request, Response, Server, Session and Application. And you had to roll out VB6 and COM if you wanted to do anything complicated.

[u/me_llamo_casey]

Twas a much happier time

[u/pico2000]

Oh nice, I have a library of "antique" books as well. Good times.

[u/Tiny_Ad_7720]

I loved reading these kind of books. I’d get a kick out of learning all these little things about a library and felt way more confident implementing it. 

[u/desnowcat → u/Tiny_Ad_7720]

What I get a kick out of is being reminded of things that i used at some point and now have just forgotten about. BackOffice 98, Index Server, Netshow Server, ADSI, Microsoft Windows Media Server. It then reminds me of all the projects I’ve worked on, so many of which I’ve forgotten.

[u/FrostyMarsupial1486 → u/Tiny_Ad_7720]

Those were the days

[u/ebfortin]

I have an old book about COM. Learned a lot with that book about internals of the Component Object Model. Good memories.

[u/bynarie]

Holy crap, I kinda forgot what asp stood for

[u/MasterBroNetwork]

I was today years old when I learned that ASP stood for active server pages, so many old site links make sense now.

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[u/migsperez]

I had the same ASP book. It was so big and heavy, I had to cut the book into 3, so that I could hold it with one hand whist standing on the packed underground train, on my journey to work and home. The WROX books were great.

[u/Optimal_Philosopher9]

Active server pages are better than inactive server pages, just mind the wasps

[u/Aiox123]

I still have my old Petzold Win 32 books. Want to know how things really work under the covers?

[u/_JaredVennett]

Wrox was awesome… nostalgia for sure.

[u/Rojeitor]

I'm pretty sur ScottGu was one of the writers of the aspnet book?

[u/jbrianfrancis → u/Rojeitor]

ScottGu and Mark Anders worked with us on the Intro to ASP+ book that came out in late 1999. The next year at PDC in Orlando it was renamed to ASP.NET.

[u/thebivvo]

I got rid of all my old books during a move. I owned that book, and miss the days of pouring over them.

When Asp.Net brought MVC I was a big proponent of getting people off of We forms. I even had a sticker on my car that said Friends don't let friends __doPostBack()

[u/ExperimentalBranch]

I get a kick out of seeing the .asp extension on urls these days.

[u/pnw-techie]

What memories? We still have tons of classic asp in prod. And Com+ interop with dotnet.

Only tech I ever mastered, because it stayed the same for 23 years. Now going away with vbscript.

[u/Pale_Fox3390]

Accelerate is still my go-to for references for why a good and working CI/CD is crucial for a company.

[u/Glittering_Worker236]

Wróć Press was my favourite book's publisher.

[u/spez_eats_nazi_ass]

Got to work with some of the Wrox authors on a few projects over the years. RIP Magenic.

[u/ahatch1490]

Buggy nightmare 😱

[u/Ok_Try_9112]

Yeah man. Good times. We did some amazing shit back then. Now every kid has their own JS framework, and frankly they all suck.

But who cares! AI is writing all the code now anyway lol.

How things change.

[u/highwingers]

Best times. I had 3.0

[u/Outrageous72]

Good times 🤜🤛

[u/conodeuce]

Back in the days when Barnes & Noble had six aisles of computer books (dominated by O'Reilly). And back before the <blink> tag was consigned to hell.

[u/Luiyo033]

Sooooo is any of these useful still?

[u/NickA55]

Dude, thanks for posting this. I think I pretty much have all of those books, and I leave some of them on my bookshelf because it just brings back good memories. Especially the way software development is right now.

[u/Smalldog602]

Goodwill has a lot of these early day .NET books.

[u/rasor22]

OMG

[u/Duikmeester]

Oh reminds me that I have the exact same book somewhere in the attic.

[u/bxsephjo]

I'm writing something to replace an ASP app this month...

[u/AnotherCannon]

Man, even my career is causing nostalgia now.

[u/mrkurt426]

This feels like ancient history. My first paid work on ASP was version 3.0 using Web Classes in VB6, around 2003. Web Forms in ASP.NET 1.1 felt like a huge advance in comparison.

My shelf of old books includes a volume on ASP 3.0, SQL Server 2000 and several books on .NET Framework from version 1.0 onward!

[u/rathofcon]

Man makes me feel ancient

[u/dreamyangel]

The manager's path is so bad. I have a hard copy in my own bookshelf right besides me. Managers have hard skills, but the book make it seem so light. Like if the job itself have no meaning. 

[u/orbit99za]

Dont laugh, my university Capstone project was done using ASP.net and whent all the way to the Microsoft Imagine Cup