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46

answers:

2

Right now, I work on a small team at a large company doing Java / J2EE web applications. My original skillset wasn't in this area, but I'm starting to get the hang of things and get some more responsibilities on the team. However, our team is in a bit of limbo, and we're unsure of the future direction of our flagship application (we're J2EE, and the majority of the teams in our group working on mainframe applications.

An opportunity has been brought to my attention on another team with opportunity for career growth and working with several people I already know. The problem is that the application they support is quite legacy, running Classic ASP with little to no push to move to a newer technology or technique.

Part of me thinks that the move would possibly stagnate my skill development, working on a legacy app in a "legacy" language. I do work on my own, picking up ASP.NET MVC, Python/Django, etc., but there obviously seems to be a difference between working in those areas professionally and just doing it on my own.

Does moving into a legacy code base and legacy platform hinder my overall career? I don't want to be pidgeonholed by any move...

+4  A: 

ASP and VB won't help with ASP.NET; they are very different. You would only learn BAD practices from legacy ASP/VB. IMO, Java and ASP.NET have a future. ASP/VB is a dead end.

Doug D
+1  A: 

Classic ASP and VB where usefull at their time. At this moment I'm working precisely migrating old web applications into the .Net world.

I'm sure you're going to waste a lot of ours doing things that can be done in minutes in .Net or Java, and I'm sure too that comming from a J2EE envirnommet your're going to feel very frustrated. Just think about creating a web service in classic ASP and VBscript or simpler than that think about consuming it. Very ugly!

I was classic ASP developer for more than five years, there wasn't .NET and maybe I was waiting to much to migrate to .NET 2.0. It's just another world!

My advice to you is very clear: "Don't do it"

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