Thanks to Stacy Pennington for hosting a interesting evening of looking at PHP, Cold Fusion, and ASP.NET. I was somewhat hesitant about the evening, not knowing what type of combatants would be there. However, it was a friendly look and comparison across the three technolgies. For those of you in the Memphis area, I recommend checking out The Toad's monthly meetings.
Stacy, who works for Rhodes College, began the night with a look at PHP. His presentation started with the basics of scripting like declaring variables, how to pass values between forms, and the various libraries that are available to the PHP developer. In an interesting twist to me, Stacy spoke on how Rhodes uses Active Directory and how his applications there use LDAP to authenticate users. Cool stuff!
Tom Kerstein of Mind Over Data presented on Cold Fusion and Flash technologies. Cold Fusion has grown up quite nicely. Macromedia is a player to watch in the battle of web development camps. Tom also talked about how some sites are using Flash front ends with Cold Fusion back ends. He showed some sites that were doing this, and I have to admit that this concept looks very nice.
I ended the evening with a look at ASP.NET. I started with looking at VS.NET, examples of ASP.NET controls, User Controls, the Liberty Bowl site developed by Quilogy, dynamic compilation, a mention of XML Web Services, Mobile Controls, and a mention of Whidbey. After a question dealing with open source, I also gave a tiny demo of Reflector.
In my preparation, Kent Sharkey pointed me to some Microsoft resources on the subject of Comparison of ASP.NET to PHP and Comaparison to Cold Fusion. These texts are nicely done and do not seem offensive to the other camps.
2:29:23 PM 
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