/bill's House O Insomnia : Sharepoint

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.

Sharepoint 2007 Training DVDs

William — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 22:44:18 GMT

Having attended Sahil's training in person, I can only say that considering the price, these DVDs are a steal. Brian has a nice write up and details but just looking at who's involved in the endeavor, you can rest assured this material is first class from start to finish.

Sharepoint Training w/ Dunn Training and Sahil Malik

William — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 16:53:02 GMT

Training is typically a large investment b/c it's time intensive and trainers usually don't work cheap. This weekend, out company hired Dunn Training and Sahil Malik to get us up to speed on Sharepoint. I can say that dealing with Dunn and Sahil was like buying a Lexus except not nearly as expensive.

Mark Dunn attended the training and was there the whole time to help out. Sahil arrived right on time and from start to finish, he covered virtually every aspect of Sharepoint that one could care about. I consider both Mark and Sahil good friends of mine but if I wasn't impressed with the training, I just wouldn't mention it. A good portion of our office showed up and Mark was kind enough to let me bring Kim.

The first few hours showed you how to use Sharepoint to do most of the common activities using the UI. Later in the afternoon, we started getting into coding tasks. If you read Sahil's ADO.NET 2.0 book , you can tell the same guy that wrote that book built this courseware. His stuff is thorough and fun and he keeps thing moving by keeping the laughs rolling.

The first day was largely what you could call common Sharepoint tasks, today we've moved on to InfoPath and workflows. Here's an outline of the courseware if you happen to be interested in it:

1. Introduction

2. Preparing a good SharePoint environment.

a. Development

b. Production

3. SharePoint security

a. Search

4. Content Types - A better way to manage your data

5. Recap

6. Leveraging VSeWSS - developing in a team environment

7. SharePoint as a WCM.

a. W3C compliant sites.

8. Writing Custom Web parts for SharePoint

9. Excel Services

10. InfoPath

11. Workflows in MOSS

a. Out of the box experience

b. SharePoint designer based workflows

c. Visual Studio based WFs

12. BDC

13. Administering and Monitoring SharePoint

To give you a feel for the audience, most of the folks were seasoned .NET developers. A few were either purely or mainly DB admins or developers. We had one technical writer and a tester. A few of the devs were much more focused on Windows Forms as opposed to ASP.NET. Only two of us had ever really done any Sharepoint development and only 4 of us had used Sharepoint 07 as an end user or dev. At the risk of sounding self-flattering, the group was pretty sharp but I would say that Sahil's approach would have worked well for just about any group you put in front of him.

Personally, I was strongest with three areas- Workflows , InfoPath and Excel Services. I had been lead technical editor on Alvin Bruney's Excel Services book and have been a worflow junkie since they came out. InfoPath is just plain cool although I frequently feel like both of us that use it are freaks b/c it's hard to run into anyone that uses InfoPath. In each aspect though, I definitely learned a few tricks. Sahil's instruction on BI and KPI's within Excel was a big hit and I think everyone pretty much found the presentation very impressive.

The InfoPath coverage was pretty darned cool too and was pretty easy to pick up on even though hardly anyone had used it before. Seeing what you can do with it and how easy it was proves that many tasks that required a developer to build before can be done by a power user although I suspect it's going to open many new doors for developers as power uses start digging into it.

So throughout the training, Sahil pointed out real world issues you'll end up dealing with and no doubt saved us from many pitfalls. In fact, the real world aspect is precisely one of the things that made this training so good. He wasn't afraid to point out that not everything is perfect with respect to Sharepoint and went one step up by giving us resources to work arounds for such problems.

Training is a pretty big investment in terms of time and money. There's no shortage of snake oil peddlers offering to help you LearnAsp or learn some other product, the type of trainers who put a lot of effort into blowing their own horns but who aren't welcome back to any more work for people they've trained or worked for in the past. Good training companies and trainers are hard to come by and before making an investment, you should really look around and talk to people that have dealt with the company and the trainer. Mark Dunn's company has the reputation they do b/c they've been around for a while and he is very picky about who deals with him. Search the internet high and low and you won't find anything non-flattering about Mark Dunn or his people. You wont' find a bunch of marketing speil and grandiose self-promotion or claims on his site b/c his customers do the advertising for him. In fact, we regularly use Mark Dunn's training for a whole variety of products and everything has always been top notch. I know Sahil is booked up for quite a while but if you're looking for unequalled Sharepoint training, you should give him or Mark a call.