I've been working in Java of late. One of the problems with Java is that you end up working with a bunch of tools from a bunch of places and it can be a bit tricky to get up to speed. Contrast that with the documentation and tutorials that Microsoft provides to bring people up to speed on their developer tools.

In keeping with the theme of Take the First Step, I've posted the first part of a tutorial on writing build files for ant. Just what we all needed, yet another Hello, World. In the next part, I'll actually get around to compiling some Java.

I should mention that the documentation for ant is pretty good. The problem is that it is, well, documentation. I prefer to start with simple working examples as templates and then expand from there.