Tool Junkies vs. the Critical Path in Software Development Suites

The sprawling city that .NET has become is a great place to live and work. Every day, it seems there is a new add-on, many of them free (as in beer, not freedom) or cheap. For all the grousing about Microsoft’s reluctant love affair with the open source community, the fact is that there are also a lot of great open source projects out there. ORMs, frameworks, libraries, Visual Studio plug-ins, you name it.

In an ideal world, I’d love to be a Tools Junkie and spend time every day trying out all these nifty things. I’m sure I’m missing out on some Great Stuff. And I have to admit I’ve got a bit of an inferiority complex when I compare myself to some of the A-list bloggers … you know, the guys whose “about me” page reads something like the following:

Joe Cool is the founder and President of CoolSoft and the leader of RadTech, the hot open source project that brings IoC to the world of TDD using POCOs. Joe was formerly with JuJuBeans, the wildly successful Silicon Valley startup, and recently accepted a position as Technology Evangelist at Microsoft. In his spare time, Joe enjoys snowboarding down glaciers at altitude, racing his award-winning speed boat, making major contributions to the Iron Ruby project, and producing genius babies with his wife, Rachel, formerly chief scientist at nanotech startup 3DFactory who cashed out and is now the founder and president of SaveTheWorld, the famous charity that seeks to insure that no child anywhere in the world will be denied free wireless or lattes…”

But in the world I live in — you know, the Real World ™ — there are a few, uh, practical problems.

The first one is that an independent consultant like myself pretty much is required to know the tools one can reasonably expect to find at any given customer site. That means Visual Studio (including all the versions still in wide use, which will shortly mean 2003, 2005 and 2008) and whatever is available on the install DVD for it. While the Microsoft dev stack is not a perfect tool, it’s pretty extensive. That means it takes time to gain proficiency with it and to keep up with the constant framework enhancements.

This doesn’t leave much time to play, nor do I often have the opportunity to justify paid experimentation. A whole slew of developers like myself pretty much stick with Visual Studio. The ALT.NET movement sometimes characterizes us as Morts, although that’s not necessarily or even often true.

I’m sure I miss out on some great stuff. There are two things on my list that I am particularly interested in checking out, both of them open source: the Umbraco CMS and the SubSonic ORM. Alas, it seems like every project I am involved in either doesn’t need them or won’t consider using them. I would have to play with these — literally — on my own time.

On a personal note, given that my children are all grown and on their own, the recent death of my wife leaves me in an interesting position, work-wise: I’m now just another 22 year old with a passion for software and no personal life (except, of course, that I’m 50). I may actually no longer have an excuse any more not to be conversant with everything from straight MS tools to ALT.NET and everything in between, and perhaps with a side order of, say, Ruby or Python or side excursion into the Java world.

But I have to wonder: is this a healthy balance for anyone? Might I not choose to increase the depth of my existing expertise? Wouldn’t that be better in the long run than being “jack of all, master of none”?

In the end, I suppose that most of what I choose to add to my personal grab-bag will still be demand-driven by my clients.