I have been interviewing for developer positions this year and although I have been accommodating of the ramp-up from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0 I feel that now, six months after the release of .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005, that it is time for developers that are presenting themselves to the market to have .NET 2.0 skills.
On our project we were lucky to start development this year and are using full-bore .NET 2.0 and in this green fields project, the use of the new technologies makes a major difference. It seems that just about every class we use has the ‘Note: This class is new in the .NET Framework version 2.0’ message at the top of the window when looking for help on MSDN. I think that our project, with it’s recent start date, uses .NET 2.0 more than your average project or development shop that is migrating to the newer framework. This means that when interviewing I am looking for *some* .NET 2.0 and VS2005 skills so that the learning curve for new developers on the team is not three to four weeks – before even touching the project.
By .NET 2.0 skills, I don’t mean that they have to be experts – with six months of real project experience on .NET 2.0 – but at least need to have ‘played around’ with the new stuff and have an opinion on what the main changes are and how it affects development. For us, the changes are significant and the mindset of the developer needs to be in tune with those subtle, but far reaching changes. We use, for example, well-structured strongly typed datasets and although in theory it is pretty straight forward, it makes a big difference to how we code and interface with the database.
Different projects and organizations have their own pace with which they move to the latest version on anything and there are many good, and practical, reasons for not tearing the shrink-wrap off a product and implementing it with wild abandon. My concern is not with the well-established projects with an architecture which has a sound base in .NET 1.1. My problem is that individuals are marketing themselves as .NET developers and don’t have a clue as to how things would work differently in .NET 2.0. Even worse are the body-shops and development shops who are taking these developers from .NET 1.1 projects and pushing them into new projects without the tiniest smidgen of training in the newer technologies – something they should at least attempt for the rates that they bill their resources out at.
So, any developers out there who haven’t gotten around to learning .NET 2.0; firstly, you are missing out on something that is cool and interesting. Secondly, if you are stuck on a .NET 1.1 project, please try and keep your skills up on .NET 2.0 for when you find yourself looking for another project or employer – at least your skills will be aligned to the market demands. It is fairly simple to get up to speed – there is free training available from Microsoft for which you don’t even need VS2005 and there are also the express versions of Visual Studio available for free. You should be able to learn enough in a few days/weekends/late nights.
To put it bluntly, if you are trying to get a job or contract and you don’t have some .NET 2.0 and VS2005 skills it indicates that you are either lazy or have a tenuous grasp of .NET anyway.
Most people reading this post will have some up-to-date skills or else they wouldn’t have found the post but unfortunately Huisgenoot and You magazine (which must be all you are reading if you haven’t heard about .NET 2.0) don’t really cater for technical blogs.
Simon Munro
PS: If you are a .NET developer looking for a contract on a .NET 2.0 project, let me know – I have an opening for you.
Cross-posted from www.delphi.co.za