Dangerous Podcasts

This is a note to anyone out there listening to Podcasts. Beware.

Any person with a mic and a recorder (both of which are on most iPods) can make a podcast. There are many podcasts made by people who really do not know what they are talking about. I’m afraid academic .net radio is one of those such podcasts.

http://www.academicdotnet.com/DesktopDefault.aspx

I just listened to the first 21 minutes (the podcast stopped there, maybe they published it wrong?) of episode 3 of the academic dot net radio show podcast. I honestly think they got more things wrong than they got right when they were describing things. I commend that they want to produce something to help student. That is great. But what I heard is truly a disservice to anyone listening. From describing what .NET is to the differences between VB.NET and C#, they got it wrong. Describing web services and soap, totally inacurate. The description of COM was also totally inacurate. And when the described Mono and its shortcomings they said “talking to Databases and Web Services aren’t there yet” !!!!! WOW?!?!? I’ve never had any issue with Mono and either of those things. AFAICT the ONLY part of Mono that is any thing short of .NET 1.1 compatibility is the lack of Windows Forms and of course the MSMQ and WMI parts of the base class library. They really did not understand how the framework is different from the base class library, which is very sad. Anyone who has spend anytime with dot net should really understand that difference. Maybe I’m a little bit too much of a langauge buff and I like formal definitions, but they were so bad that they were doing a disservice.

So if you happend to read this because you searched for dot net or dotnet and podcast, please don’t listen to the academic .net radio show. Go back and listen to Dot Net Rocks from episode 1 instead. Wait until those academic guys from Canada get their act together.

Also, as someone who spent 8 and 1/2 years as a student at a university and 6 years working at one for a total of 10 years being involved in academia, I expect more from something, anything, which calls itself academic. There was absolutely nothing academic about this show. Elementary or beginner would be better words. That said, I truly hope that they get their act together and figure something out and produce worthwhile content. I think it is an important hole which does need to be filled.