All I Wanted Was My Data
by Barry Gervin
Most .NET developers are going to need to access relational data at some point. For somebody approaching .NET for the first time, the data access story in the .NET world can be a little overwhelming to say the least. Existing .NET developers looking to update their data access techniques can face a similar overwhelming experience. This article will help you understand the currently shipping mainstream technologies and how you can choose the one that is right for your particular needs.
Remaining Valuable to Employers
The current economic turmoil has left many developers with uncertainties about their jobs. A big question on many people’s minds is "What can I do to make sure I am the most valuable developer to my current or prospective employer?"
Recently we asked 6 technology leaders to provide some advice on what developers should be doing to make themselves more valuable at work.
You might find their perspectives surprising:
(There’s an embed code if you want to share this video with others on your own site.)
Beyond VB and C#
by Ted Neward
Within the .NET community, a low-grade battle rages between two groups, those who use Visual Basic and those who use C#, and never has the world of Computer Science seen a more virulent and angry battle… except maybe for those who argue where the curly-braces should go in C++ and C# code. Not that there’s really anything to argue about, anyway; as any right-thinking C# developer knows, they go on the next line. But that’s not the point of this article, so we’ll move on.
(Besides, I’m right, anyway.)
The problem, of course, is that a viewpoint that limits itself to just those two languages misses out on a much larger world, one which contains a much larger set of tools than just those two languages. And while those two languages, like other object-oriented languages before them, are each genuinely useful languages, the unfortunate fact of each is that they are, at heart, just object-oriented languages. And while that may hardly seem to be a limiting factor, considering how much we’ve been able to accomplish with those languages to date, much of that viewpoint stems from the fact that most .NET developers have never seen anything else.
You know the old saying: When all you have is a hammer….
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Working with Brownfield Code
During our careers as developers we sit in training courses, conference sessions and vendor demos in which we hear about how easy and great technology XYZ is for creating applications. And almost every one of them assumes that we’re working on new development. I’m not sure about you, but I find that new (or greenfield) application development has been fairly rare in my career.
More often than not, we developers are working in companies that already have a suite of custom software. If you’re brought in to work on a specific project, it’s rare that the project hasn’t had something already started on it. As a result, most developers spend a large part of their careers working with or on someone else’s code. I don’t think this is a bad thing. Instead I think that it is something that we should embrace with good practices, strong tooling and a strong desire to succeed.