Moving From Beginner to Intermediate

I've always thought that developers can fall into two categories. Category A does their 9 to 5 job, then goes home and plays around with all the things they don't see at work. Category B does their 9 to 5, then goes home and hangs out with friends, reads a fiction book, or watches TV all evening.

Ok so not everyone falls into exactly those two categories, but you can see what I am insinuating. Some developers have a natural drive/desire for knowledge, and they'll find it. That's what fuels them, drives them to install the Orcas Beta, get into work early to catch up on all their blogs, or sends them to their local community user group.

Don't think for a second that you can't fall into category B in be a good developer. That's definately not true, but I think a proper analysis would show statisitcs in favour of the fact. So quite possibly YOU have that drive, and you want to take your skills to the next step. You're a junior somewhere, and you're not getting the innovation/learning you think you need to get the good jobs. What do you do?

Well if you put yourself in category B, I can't help you. But if you have the desire/drive, here's some things to consider:

Design Patterns
Buy a good patterns book like those I listed in an earlier post. Learn why patterns are important and learn the most popular ones. Quite interestingly, I did a technical test for my new job, and one of the questions was 'Describe a design pattern that you like - NOT "Singleton", "Factory" or "Provider"' ! Some companies value this knowledge.

Refactoring
Learn about refactoring especially. Even learning design patterns for refactoring can be extremely useful!

Blogs
Subscribe to a 'healthy' amount of blogs. It helps if you have something new to read every day. You might find some authors who interest you, or you might stick to the big names like ScottGu. When I say 'healthy' I mean not so many that you can't keep up, and that you are getting duplication of topics. And not too few that you aren't getting a post or two per day. Its good to go to work and discuss a new post about some technology or other (if you have that kind of environment!)

Podcasts
I personally spend one night a month just downloading a whole heap of podcasts, then burn them as CD audio so I can listen to them in my car! This means that when I'm sitting in traffic, I'm actually learning. I can suggest www.asp.net for .Net specific, or IT Conversations for general IT topics. I find webcasts useful for learning about a specific topic, but podcasts can be listened to while you're on the move, walking the dog, on the bus, etc.

Lately Microsoft have been releasing a new technology at a rate of what seems like, 1 a day. So its almost a full time job just keeping up! If you want any more ideas about how to progress your career, I might be able to help.. just ask!

My First Silverlight App

I like to learn by doing. So after watching the ScottGu video on the
Silverlight website I decided to learn Silverlight by creating a Naughts and Crosses game (Tic Tac Toe). You can see my initial attempt here.

So I suppose its pretty crappy to look at, but hey, I'm no designer. And its my first app, so what do you expect??? I didn't want to post it until I could go back and make it better. It needs serious refactoring, there's missing functionality, and its probably doing things the "wrong way".

But Scott Barnes encouraged me to publish it now so I have. The idea now is to display the flawed project, and then post each iteration as it improves. At the end of each iteration, I'll post details about the changes and what improved. The focus won't just be about Silverlight specific functionality. For example, the way the CROSS control is loaded is purely hardcoded. Ideally there should be a dynamic way to load different CROSS Xaml files depending on user selection, such that a designer could just add a new Cross object from Expression Designer into a /Cross/ folder.

Hopefully as we progress on this project we'll come to realise some new design patterns for creating functionality that is friendly to designers and developers both, something that might not be so well defined because such integration hasn't existed before now.

So I am completely open to suggestions about how we progress from here. Oh, and to contributions too.

Visual Studio Orcas Beta

I only downloaded the March CTP about 2 weeks ago. Then last week Microsoft released Beta 1.
Its not like I'm complaining... I have 20gb a month so whats the problem?

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5d9c6b2d-439c-4ec2-8e24-b7d9ff6a2ab2&DisplayLang=en

That's it. Download it. There's also a white paper on Orcas:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=17319EB4-299C-43B8-A360-A1C2BD6A421B&displaylang=en

You can find Virtual PC versions floating around for the March CTP but even more interesting is that you can also download Beta 1 of Team Foundation Server and Team Suite as Virtual PC images as well.

Personally, I'm looking forward to LINQ, XLINQ, and intellisense for Javascript amongst other things. ASP.NET Ajax is also fully integrated and supported in Orcas. Check the white paper appendix for a full list of all the new features.

Going with this release is the Beta release of .Net Framework 3.5. I must say that I am a little lost when it comes to Microsoft's version numbering. Anyway, no need to install all those extensions floating around... Just go for 3.5. Suffice to say that there are a lot of cheaper hosting companies that do not support .Net 2.0 yet (well mine anyway!) let alone, 3.0, or 3.5. The releases are coming thick and fast, although it seems an eternity since I first saw LINQ at Tech Ed last year.

Oh finally, check out the video from ScottGu on the Silverlight "Getting Started" page.
http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/

You can download the 1.1 alpha tools for building Silverlight applications in Orcas. And Expression Blend is available for 6 month trial from the Microsoft web site. You'll be able to fully recreate the integration that Scott demonstrates in the video.

I certainly will be once this 5gb download finishes...