Your boss would make about as much sense if he wanted you to move to Eclipse for family reasons and other reasons associated with the Dow Jones Industrial average. There's a fat non sequitur or two hiding in there somewhere.

I'm fairly experienced with .NET and Perl, so:

Using Visual Studio.NET isn't going to help you build code that creates SQL/DDL any better than Emacs/vim will. VS.N does offer some nifty tools for creating queries, stored procedures, etc., but doesn't offer squat in the way of creating code that will let you 'burn' databases. Using ADO.NET might give you better performance than using DBI, but that's probably not going to matter unless you are creating hundreds of databases at the same time.

VS.N has about as much to do with security as Notepad does. The .NET platform (which is not the same thing as VS.N) does have some spiffy APIs for users/groups/permissions which makes it easier to code securely (if you even know HOW to code securily), but there's precious little about .NET that makes it inherently more secure than Perl or even Java.

I don't have a whole lot bad to say about .NET. I just know that its still alot easier to do most things w/Perl, at least for me. I've never tried the .NET version of Perl ($295!) but I have read positive things about it.

It sounds to me like your boss just thinks that .NET is just somehow 'cooler' or more buzzword-compliant. And that eventually he/she will want you to code with C# or (be very afraid!) VB.NET.

In my experience there is absolutely no reason to use VS.NET over Perl. I work in R&D at my company, and "am not a coder" as considered by IT here...sha right, and I use Perl to get things done quick regarding db's. It would take the IT dept alot longer to code something as good in *shriek* vb.net.

You can use pretty much any( don't say all due to the .."always an exception to the rule" clause) OLE object in perl...therefore the "advantages" gained by using VS.NET are strikingly minimal.

You can throw all the buzzwords you want at a problem and it won't solve it any faster.

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Grygonos

We have one project we maintain for a client which was done in Active States Perl for .NET. Development time is a lot longer than for the same thing done other ways, so we call our resident expert the dinosaur tamer, but it has been quite succesfull, we haven't found any serious problems or vulnerabilities. We didn't create the application, we just maintain and enhance it.

jdtoronto

He took his advise from a university professor of extreme intelligence.

Dump programmers can make security errors in any language. The only way to fix it is education, or break the Turning-completeness of your language. Appeals to Authority don't make these facts any less true.

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I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

: () { :|:& };:

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

Spend a few bob on Programming Perl in .NET Environment Read it, have it on your desk visibily, and quote from it occasionally so he may find enlightenment.