That last part is crucial. I gave up trying to micromanage projects and I gave up trying to portray some sort of corporate atmosphere on my website and embraced the new AGILE and family oriented business model. AGILE is more than a word. It’s more than a project management methodology. It’s how we do business. I think I’ve gushed enough about this recently so I’ll leave it at that.

Since I am a football fan though and now is the time of year that coaches are either fired or rained with praise, I have been hearing a lot of quotes about programs being run like a family. When a player is recruited to Ohio State, he is part of the OSU family and that family actually extends beyond the football field. I work for OSU and I feel part of it. At Home Base I’m trying to instill the same values. So our newest installment of awesomeness is what we call the Sunday Code Marathons. Brittany and I try to cook a great meal every Sunday for clients and employees alike and we all sit around and code and work on projects for a few hours… or all night… or for 10 minutes before we start playing some board games or watching football. It’s great. We can all sort of feel the excitement and energy of the company being on the move. We have some great clients right now and some great projects and every week we are introduced with new, fun challenges that we are ready to tackle together.

2010 was a great year that ended on an especially high note. I am very optimistic that 2011 will be even better. We are all looking forward to churning out really cool projects like a well oiled machine. Happy New Year!

UI that looked sexy in Photoshop almost always looks overdesigned when we try it for real in the browser. Here’s a hypothesis. Simple and useful designs just don’t seem good enough when they are dead pixels. They need to be brought to life before they can be appreciated. Until that happens we overcompensate with garnish.

- Ryan From 37Signals

Well, folks, the good people at Home Base Web Solutions are here to offer an unbiased overview of the two for your reading enjoyment.  We do realize that if you are reading this article, you probably are thinking of programming your own website rather than paying us to do it for you and we are OK with that.  If your site fails, give us a call and we will make it right.

First of all, before getting into specific pros vs cons of the PHP vs .NET, there are some important general concepts to understand:

• First and foremost, .NET is a framework, PHP is a language.  .NET can be developed using many different languages, the most popular are C# and VB.
• .NET is proprietary, PHP is Open Source.  Support IS available for both.  Microsoft support may come from certified professionals, but sometimes costs money.  PHP support is more readily available, but may come from forums with no guarantees.
• .NET may include compiled code (.dll’s), PHP is interpreted at run time.  If designed properly, this should result in faster loading pages in .NET… however, unless you are doing some sort of very complex operations behind the scenes, the difference is negligible.  There are probably specific examples out there where one method is faster than another, but there are many variables that go into how fast a page will load.  If the page is designed well, it will load fast.  A nanosecond either way won’t bring down anyone’s server.

Now below is a quick comparison of some general features comparing PHP vs .NET.

Now before we get a million comments about the quick run-down above, it is important to note that it IS possible to develop object oriented code using PHP and just because .NET has some neat debugging capabilities doesn’t mean that they’re always immediately easy to implement. There is plenty of material out there that argues tooth and nail either way, but in our general experience, we have found everything above to hold true… for us.

At Home Base we may use either .NET or PHP depending on the application. Small standard web applications such as blogs, brochure websites, standard shopping carts, and basic content management systems are done using pre-existing open source, PHP based solutions. WordPress, Joomla, and a host of shopping cart solutions are out there. They are easy to install and easy to customize. An entry level programmer can open up a PHP based website and probably figure out some of the nuts and bolts of the system to make some minor changes.

For large custom applications, our preference is to use .NET. The scalability, built in components, and inherent object oriented framework provide solid fundamentals for a well designed application. .NET also provides us a platform to more easily implement a multi-tiered framework, which allows us to use some development techniques such as test driven development, or the ability to plug in specialists into specific layers if ever necessary.  .NET also opens the door for us to have multiple User Interface gateways.  We could develop an application and interchange a web interface with a mobile interface with a desktop interface or even some custom robotic pimp shit interface that hasn’t been invented yet.  If your application is properly layered, you can interchange all of those UI’s without touching your core.  (I am currently developing an application for the Microsoft Surface. 90% of my development and testing will be using a simulator. This is all possible, and easy, with proper layering.)  We will save the benefits of an N-Tier software architecture for another post though.

We also prefer MS SQL Server 2005/2008 vs MySQL, but again, that’s another post. You can technically use either database application for either PHP or .NET, but typically SQL Server comes hand in hand with .NET and the same holds true for MySQL with PHP.  If your database is small (<100,000 records) and your server load isn’t at CNN levels, MySQL should work fine.

I will try to update this post with some good links to similar content.

With Google announcing that Chrome OS, a completely web based operating system, will be on the shelves in the fall of 2010, this is an interesting counter by Microsoft. Google has been somewhat of a pioneer in the Web 2.0 shift from static web content to fully functional web based software applications. It has been fun watching the sort of Old School vs New School battle of behemoths jocky for position.

Now that we are done with the Flash era (thank God) and newer technologies allow for lighter weight online apps, it’s going to be interesting watching the industry move from desktops to the web. Pretty soon everything is going to be hosted online and you will start to see the lines blurred between your laptop and your cell phone. If you think about BlackBerries and iPhones, the movement has already started. With VPN technology, you can literally work securely as if you were in your office from just about anywhere in the world… just ask this guy: