I'm no longer cutting edge. Well, I guess I've never really been super cutting edge, but since the ASP 3.0 days I've always been on the forefront of new ASP-related goodness coming down the Microsoft pipeline... I started working with classic ASP 3.0 months before it officially shipped with Windows 2000 / IIS 4 when I started working on my first book. Right as I was finishing my second (and final) book on classic ASP I was invited up to Redmond to learn about this new technology, ASP+ (which later became ASP.NET). Those were the days.
Here we are now, getting closer to having an RTM version of 2.0, and I'm so far behind. I've looked into 2.0, played around with it, even written some tutorials on the GridView, but I've not created an end-to-end application with ASP.NET 2.0 or done anything remotely close to it to prepare myself for my upcoming book, which I've yet to start and whose priority seems to be diminishing daily. I feel so outdated.
A large part of this is due to the fact that I do quite a bit more consulting work these days than I used to do in the past and my clients are happy with ASP.NET 1.x (not that I've tried to convince them to switch their existing, working ASP.NET 1.x systems to beta software). I will master ASP.NET 2.0 here sooner than later, but what concerns me is that I'll need to know both ASP.NET 1.x and 2.0 quite intimately. The 4Guys visitors and my students will be interested in 2.0 content, but my clients will want me to keep expanding their existing, functional 1.x systems.
There was a time when I knew classic ASP and VBScript like a second language. It's been years since I've last created or edited a classic ASP page, thankfully. Without the practice with ASP/VBScript, however, this “second language” has fallen into disrepair. I had to write some VBScript the other day and was able to whip it out in 15 minutes or so, but about 13 minutes of that was poking around the Microsoft Scripting docs.
I know there's a lot less difference between ASP.NET 2.0 and 1.0 than between classic ASP and ASP.NET, but nevertheless I find myself worrying that I won't be able to have a mastery of both versions like I know I will need. I'm concerned that as I learn and use ASP.NET 2.0 more and more that my ASP.NET 1.x skills will erode, where it will take twice as long to tackle some given ASP.NET 1.x task than it does now, and that's not fair to my clients. I don't mind change in the least - if I did I'd be in the wrong field - I'm just hoping that I can continue to thrive in the 1.x and 2.0 worlds simultaneously.