/bill's House O Insomnia : C# 3.5

Looking for some .NET Developers

William — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 02:19:26 GMT

A client of mine located in the Aiken/Columbia South Carolina Area has asked me if I had any friends who are .NET Developers and looking for a job. They are looking for at least one Junior Developer, on Mid-Level Developer and several Senior developers. I know these folks quite well and I can vouch for the following:

They pay extremely well
Generous benefits package
There's plenty of cool people on their staff
They are growing at an explosive rate so there's plenty of room for upward mobility. There's also a very strong focus on learning/teaching and career development.
They are an Agile/SCRUM shop
Currently developing with the following technologies:

Visual Studio Team System 2008 / .NET 3.5 Framework
Windows Communication Foundation
Windows Presentation Foundation
ASP.NET
LINQ
Silverlight
Windows Mobile 5/ Windows Mobile 6/ .NET Compact Framework
Sql Server 2005 / Sql Server 2008
Windows Installer for XML
Sandcastle

If you're in the area and looking for a job... if you know someone who looking for a job.... or if you're willing to move, please drop me a line using the Contact option on my blog or emailing me directly at WilliamRyan@gmail.com and I'll put you in contact with them. They are looking to hire folks immediately so I can probably get you an interview within a few days.

Junior Developer:

Ideal candidate will be a recent college graduate with a Computer Science of MIS degree. No experience is necessary for this position. The main soft-skill qualifications for this position are:

A true love for development
Strong desire to learn
A desire to stand out among one's peers

The hard-skill qualifications include a good theoretical understanding of at least two of the following:

Object Oriented Design and Analysis
Relational Database theory
Design Patterns
Familiarity with at least two of the following: C, C++, Java, C#, VB.NET

This is essentially a dream job for recent college grads b/c the job is being offered "no experience required". Since they are a SCRUM/Agile shop, you'll get to work extensively with their Senior and Mid level devs via Pair Programming. You'll be able to pick an area to specialize in which you will decide on for yourself. Additionally, you'll be using some of the most sought after Microsoft technologies available. Go to Monster.com or Dice.com and see for yourself how much demand there is for the above technologies and how much those jobs pay. You'll get to work with these on day 1 and essentially carve out a path for yourself using whichever technologies you like the best. If you want to be a "UI" expert, that's where you'll be put. If you want to be a Web Services dev, again, that's what you can focus on. If you want to be an expert buildmaster who specializes in installers, that's what you'll get to do. The company is looking for some excellent candidates and willing to offer a really fun and great paying job with plenty of training and career development available.

Mid-Level Developer:

The ideal candidate will have a computer science or MIS degree and 1-3 years of development experience. The ideal candidate will have two or more the following abilities:

Solid command of OOP/OOD using C++, C#, Java or VB.NET
Test Driven Design
Service Oriented Architecture
Familiarity with MySql, Sql Server (T-SQL), Oracle (PL/SQL)
Basic understanding of both Winforms and ASP.NET
Basic familiarity with Web Services, MSMQ, Enterprise Services/COM+, .NET Remoting, DCOM, J2EE, Java Beans

Just like the Junior development positions, these ones will provide a great deal of flexibility to learn and specialize the area of your choice. These are considered 'fast track' positions to move into the Senior Developer or Architect roles

Senior Developer:

The ideal candidate will be someone with at least 4 years experience. This person will love challenges and love coming up with solutions to problems that other people run from. They will be people that love figuring out how to do things that everyone else said can't be done. They will be the stereotypical Alpha-Geek, Someone that spends their spare time answering quiz questions like these:

All of the requirements for the Mid-Level Developer as well as several of the following skills:

Proficiency with T-Sql or PL/SQL. You should be able to write a 5 table join on your own. You should have written several stored procedures that were > 100 lines long.
Strong command of query tuning and ability to easily spot design flaws
Ability to design 'real' objects.

Someone who pays meticulous attention to the scope modifiers of their classes/functions/properties
Someone who understands the problems associated with coupling and strives to avoid it.
Someone who can write and use events in their classes without thinking twice about it.
Someone with a solid understanding of thread safety and thread synchronization
Someone who is comfortable using several different design patterns
Someone who is comfortable implementing several different interfaces in one object, using combinations of interface implementation and inheritance and someone who can use inheritance responsibly

Keeps up with technology, reads computer books regularly, has favorite blogs in multiple disciplines and/or blogs themselves, attends or speaks at user's groups, is active in one or more online forum or newsgroup
Someone who answers "Which is better, C# or VB.NET?" with "Either can be better depending on the circumstances but I'm comfortable writing in either of them" and then "But I've been learning F# lately and it's really been growing on me"
Experience with .NET Remoting, Web Services & Web Services Enhancements, MSMQ, Enterprise Services and/or WCF
Ability to create syntactically correct UML diagrams (meaning they can do more than write the letters "UML" on their resume) and if not, they are willing to learn to do this.
Understands data structures solidly and could easily implement their own HashTable or LinkedList
Someone who's always looking to come up with a newer, cooler, faster, and more secure way to do implement something
Experienced with either Biztalk server or Sharepoint
Takes pride in their code without falling in love with it or getting all defensive about it. Ability to acknowledge the fact that everyone makes mistakes and can talk about their mistakes/bugs without getting defensive.
Someone who is the first to raise their hand whenever the boss says "I need someone to learn ____________, do I have any volunteers"

Basically, if you love development, love creating new cutting edge solutions all the while making a lot of money and having a lot of fun you definitely should talk to these folks. If you're interested...... Please drop me a line using the Contact option on my blog or emailing me directly at WilliamRyan@gmail.com and I'll put you in contact with them.

LINQ Gotcha

William — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

After a long hiatus, I was trying to figure out something cool or at least interesting to blog about. I was having trouble figuring out what I wanted to write, but then one after another, I got a ton of ideas.

One thing I wanted to do for my current project was finding out if a specific ConnectionString was present in the <ConnectionStrings> setting of a .config file. This is a big oversimplification but it's close enough to explain. So I wrote the following:

var myVar = from cs in ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings
            select cs;

foreach (var Mine in myVar) { Console.WriteLine(myVar); }

I knew the second I tried to write a where clause that there was a problem b/c intellisense wasn't showing anything I expected. When I tried to display some of the properties in the foreach loop, nothing was visible. I knew something was wrong. So I tried to compile and got the following error:

Could not find an implementation of the query pattern for source type 'System.Configuration.ConnectionStringSettingsCollection'. 'Select' not found. Consider explicitly specifying the type of the range variable 'cs'.

Well, that was helpful b/c I knew at least the problem was with the range variable . I wasn't sure what type of collection the ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings property was so I decided to look it up just to be sure. (I also just wanted to make sure it was in fact some type of collection or another. I couldn't imagine that it wouldn't have been, but just wanted to make sure for purely superstitious reasons) Ok, so it's a ConnectionStringsSettingsCollection , nothing surprising there. Digging deeper I saw that ConnectionStringsSettingsCollection inherits from ConfigurationElementCollection . At that point, it all became crystal clear for I saw the following in the class definition:

public abstract class ConfigurationElementCollection : ConfigurationElement, ICollection, 
    IEnumerable

Do you see the problem? There's an IEnumerable but no IEnumerable<T> . You see, the collection implements the non-Generic IEnumerable but not the Generic IEnumerable. Hence, a explicit range variable is in order to make this work. I know I know, that's exactly what the error message recommended, but I didn't understand why at first and wanted to dig deeper into it. So bascially, here's what was needed to make it work. Simply use the Cast<T> extension method on the collection and well, that's it.

ConnectionStringSettingsCollection cfg = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings;

varmyvar = from cs in cfg.Cast<ConnectionStringSettings>() select cs; foreach (var mine in myvar) { Console.WriteLine(mine); }

Of course, you could just cut out some of the bloat and address the collection directly

var myvar = from cs in ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings.Cast<ConnectionStringSettings>() select cs;
foreach (var mine in myvar) { Console.WriteLine(mine); }

Whenever Intellisense doesn't do what you're expecting it to, that's the first tipoff something is wrong in your query. Although my days of 2 day work weeks have come to an end temporarily, I'll try to find some time to blog the rest of what I was working on - there's so much you can do with LINQ that I often overlook. And this is the first time I've come across the explicit range variable issue but I'm guessing it'll come up again, particularly if you use LINQ regularly.