BillOntario

I am a 58 year old senior thermal power and cogeneration engineer recently out of work. I’ve always wanted to automate lots of calculations and find it limiting what I can do with the tools I have. I’ve made pipe sizing application using Excel with VBA and forms. It works well and my colleagues use it some. But when I started to implement some things from my wish list of improvements, I found that with the data input table and results table and calculations all together was making me crazy. Then I understood the reason for what I read about separate input/output presentation layer, business logic layer and database. Excel was useful because inputs and outputs are in tables and it has tables built-in. But there must be a better way, and I can use Excel format for output if needed. My goal is to develop engineering applications with reusable code. The web is just a way of deploying what I want to make, but I could deploy other ways or just use for my own calculations. I just don’t want to write the code over again for different platforms. I’m thinking that ASP.NET would be a better choice than PHP Linux, since I could use the same backend engineering calculation code for Excel or corporate intranets. Companies likely have intranets with .NET Framework, so I could offer my services to make custom web apps for their teams, and reuse the same backend software. I’m partial to functional programming, so F# with Visual Studio seems good. I have no intention of learning C, C++, Python, Java, etc. Does it make sense that Windows hosting would be the best choice for me? I just want to learn one framework, since I don’t plan to be a freelance developer or to work for a company.

When the site is complete, wouldn't you continue to have access as web-master for maintenance? It would seem that it could work the same way from the start.