I discovered your websites while sniffing MSDN through developer groups for some answers. Your question like "Non-portable arithmetic in C#?" is really something that I would not have found in most posts. Then I got to your website and saw your other well rounded talents inspired me.

I myself is a software engineer and no where near your capabilities. Balancing work, maintaining websites, writing articles and reviews, etc. Most people (including myself) would just struggle to write programs that works and would not even bother to understand why certain things are done the way it is.

You got my respect man. I just had to leave some message behind before I stumble back into my routine fueled with inspiration.

Come to think of deep understanding about technologies, here is a brief and painful struggle with my inability to produce insightful arguments.

Yesterday, I got on to a conversation with my brother who is also a software engineer about the question "why ASP.NET is better than classic ASP?" I struggle to explain the resuablity and maintenablity. His arguments were based on one person developement scenario on a relatively routine website with intensive data access. He short me down one by one comparing the steps that involve to create and modify the pages in .NET and classic ASP. E.g When I say use of controls, error handling libraries/mechanism and db libraries for reusability, he would say I can do the same with classic ASP. He saw use of code behind as a bad thing because he needs to compile the web site instead just modifying the file like in CLASSIC ASP. I said the purpose of code behind is separating presentation from data and business logic and is a good thing for maintenence and he short me down by why it is better when I can do the same changes with same or even fewer steps in classic ASP. No matter what scenario I gave he said he could do the same while I know that it could be achieve with class ASP but in a clumsy way, I cannot seem to produce a good argument for his case (one developer, one website) why there is an advantage in .NET ASP. For reusability he say that I do not need it in my environment because I am only one person and even if I need to reuse I can still write functions and asp file includes. So apart from sesion state server, security, web service, he did not think that .NET is better in anyway. Everything for him is the number of steps that he needs to do to accomplish something. If the steps are shorter he would buy it. So of course I cannot point him out based on the steps involve to change something on a website written in .NET and written in classic ASP. For him the no of steps that it takes to accomplish something is tangible and is his way of weighing advantages and disadvantages. Everything else did not matter. Since I could not came up with strong example for beating .ASP I finally gave up trying to explain things to him. If you have good arguments in terms of number of steps that one needs to creat page and modify page would be great if you could post it on this site.

Woah, thanks - I never realized this site might actually inspire anyone, usually I'm the one inspired by others trying to figure out how they manage to do all the things they do while still maintaining a healthy personal life...

Anyway as for your question, there ARE some scenarios where ASP.NET simply isn't as good as classic ASP; particularly where the classic "one developer, productivity-first, no-frills" scenario applies. ASP.NET has some glaring advantages and disadvantages compared to ASP: first off, the productivity of a fledgeling ASP.NET developer is not anywhere near the kind of productivity an experienced ASP developer can attain. The same is true for VB6 vs WinForms GUI applications; a very good VB developer can beat the pants off of a .NET developer by sheer product volume. ASP is much simpler and has a much smaller learning curve than its .NET counterpart.

However, in most other scenarios ASP.NET has a tangible advantage. The VM'd multilingual aspect of ASP.NET allows a developer to write code in a multitude of languages (which is a boon for large companies with diverse talents), but that's the most trivial of the advantages. For big applications code-behind is a major productivity boon which reduces training time and cost, reduces the bugcount and often reduces code complexity considerably; with ASP.NET writing XML web services is a breeze (a technology which seems to be getting more prominent by the minute); disconnected database paradigm, finely-grained (and certainly more refined) state management and other features give ASP.NET applications the potential for far greater performance and scalability than their ASP equivalents. Unlike .NET languages VBScript is not a fully-featured programming language - .NET languages give you proper object-oriented features, assemblies allow you to redistribute your controls and manage versioning far better than you ever could with ASP. Finally, the little experience I have with classic ASP led me to the conclusion that there are no ASP-capable IDEs that come even remotely close to Visual Studio 2003 (working with VS6 on ASP code was horrible). Newer is not always better - but I believe in most scenarios ASP.NET is superiour to ASP.

Just read your review of Fallout 2 on Moby Games and I know it's so many years old BUT I love the game too much and just found it a bit flawed and inaccurate.

* The bugs were/are all too real but many have been rectified with the latest user patches (not that that helps if you bought it in 1998 like I did :) ).
* Many of the 'ferreting' jobs you highlighted are well written and given adequate explaination by the NPC's concerned, OR, they are there to make the player work for goodies. I think you're just being a bit pedantic.
* Conversational errors/conflicts are almost inevitable in a game with the amount of complex dialogue trees Fallout has, I am trying to think of a comparison but there just aren't any.
* The sides quests you mention can be completed, the ghost requires a locket and her remains buried in her empty grave in return for xp, the scorpion can be outsmarted (in a game of chess if I recall properly) and I think this also provides xp, the Wanamingo's are just mutants (I think it's explained in game) and the whole point is that it is supposed to be random, think about the Startrek shuttlecraft or the Bridge of Death, it's meant to be funny!
* FEV at the end I can't comment as I can't remember BUT Horrigan can be beaten easily... you reprogramme the defence turrets and they will attack him for you, it takes a while but he will die to them, especially if you assist. If I remember correctly the President can be killed if you close all the doors and don't let anyone notice, or plant explosives on him and blow him up, or I think the FEV will work if done correctly.

In short I feel as though your review came from a lack of understanding of the game dynamics, rather than insight and experience. Which annoys me because this game is easily in my top five of all time, and it deserves to be.

Play it again! You know you want to!

Hi. Can you please fix the Defender of the Crown music download links. Thanks. :)