Four Years Post-Bangkok, and Life Goes On

Wow, it's been four years since I moved back to the U.S. - to Oregon, specifically - and about that long since my last blog post.  In that time, I've bought a house, and had a second son!  After a couple jobs as Senior Software Engineer (at CarePayment) and then Principal Software Engineer (at Arris), I moved on earlier this year to Amazon Web Services (AWS), as an Enterprise Solutions Architect.

For the first time in my life, my primary computer (my work laptop) is a Mac, specifically a MacBook Pro, which is really nice hardware and a great (retina) screen.  It's pretty similar to working on a Windows 7 machine, really, although Microsoft Office (specifically, Outlook) is missing a lot of features.  And I've had to learn a bunch of new shortcuts, etc.  One thing I really missed was being able to create .NET apps, and using a nice IDE like Visual Studio.  Between that and the missing Office features, I started looking at buying my own ThinkPad, and getting it imaged with the Amazon corporate OS image (we can't hook it up to the network otherwise).  I also have an Amazon-provided virtualized Windows machine (via Amazon Workspaces) accessed via the RDP-like Workspaces client.  That's usually good enough if bandwidth is okay, and I installed Visual Studio 2015 Community edition on it, etc.

On my Mac, though, I installed Visual Studio Code, a stripped-down IDE, sometime in May I think.  But it wasn't until today that I decided to try out the new c# plug-in for it, and the .NET Core install for Mac OS X.  Along with a few other tools (Yeoman, installed via npm), it actually allowed me to create a new ASP.NET MVC project (complete with skeleton views and controllers, and HTML, and Boostrap for UI), and run it.  On a Mac.  If you remember Steve Ballmer as CEO of Microsoft, you know why this sorta blows my mind.

Here's the screenshot (note the localhost URL):


Sweeeet!