SA Developer .NET

In regards to Kevin's question about way I want to push for 100% Microsoft.

The shortest answer would be, I don't know.

As a developer, I find myself trying out every new language and language feature to say that I at least tried it once but where will that leave me in the long run? A developer that is agnostic to a specific technology and what it offers while not knowing what else is out there? I'm especially keen on the Microsoft development life cycle, the way that the languages are extended and written to fit the various consumer needs, but lack the understanding of why a choice to stick with Microsoft products out-weighs what other vendors and developers have on the market.

Is this the wrong idea that I have?

I'm working hard to become a MCP and eventually an MSA and pushing Microsoft technologies seems like a good way to prove to myself that I have what it takes? I might be wrong with my approach, I don't know?

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'Not everything is binary, if you look closer you might find some hexadecimal in there somewhere'

Hi there,

I saw what KevinT was talking about in your "KIOSK" post.  I personally feel one should stick to only one "dev house" as it were for the following reasons:

1. If you support or dev more than 1 technology (Microsoft and say, Java/JSP), it means you need people who can understand both, which (especially these days), are hard to come by. And no too many people are keen to do this (reason 2, below). And by understand I mean, can rapidly switch from one tech to the other, without issues. And also, 9 times out of 10, the salaries these developers

2. Integration issues. If you have one app (especially, web), that works with say, Java, and the new requirement is something .NET can deliver quicker and better suited to the requirement, integration between the two can be a nightmare, especially as the older tech usually is so buggered up (spaghetti code, no SP's etc, proprietary framework, very abstract DAL).

3. The ASP.NET architecture has grown so much the past few years that practically anything is possible to do with it, especially since the introduction of AJAX. I've seen some pretty awesome apps written with ASP.net and AJAX, and that was before .NET 3.5. Sure, you can probably code something like that with JSP, PHP, etc, but I think the time spent will be much longer.

Just my 3c for the day

The H..................

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The Question is the Answer, and the Answer is the Question!

You probably want some knowledge of the other options out there so that you don't go recommending a saw when a screwdriver would be more appropriate. There's nothing wrong with specialising, it can be good for your career, but don't ignore everything out there. You should at least know what the alternatives are, especially if you're thinking about an architect position in the future.

I'm working hard to become a MCP and eventually an MSA and pushing Microsoft technologies seems like a good way to prove to myself that I have what it takes? I might be wrong with my approach, I don't know?

MCP is about technical compentancy, not what technologies you recommend. Don't know about MCA but I would imagine it's more about skills and experience than how much you've pushed MS stuff.

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Gail Shaw - SQL In the Wild
SQL Server MVP
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Chaos, panic and disorder. My job here is done!

I assume that by MSA you mean MCA (Microsoft Certified Architect).  When I was persuing an MCA, cross-stack and platform agnostic architecture were important points, although I fear that this is more related to marketing (trying to make the MCA sound less MS centric and evil) than actually anything to do with good architecture.

I reckon that if you stick to a MS stack you will eventually have some (enough?) exposure to other environments to be enough of an all-rounder.  If you have a personal rule of MS *languages* only you will eventually get enough experience integrating with all other non MS stuff. Oracle, MySQL, Web Services, ESB's (eventually), Javascript, JQuery etc

What you guys are saying is that by "forcing" a development team to go with a pure Microsoft approach in the hope that it benefits me in becoming an architect might be, in some cases a good thing, but in general not the approach that I should take?

Rather continue on a personal quest to understand Microsoft's respect to development and know how it can be used along side other languages and technologies, but still being involved as a voice for our team, where necessary?

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'Not everything is binary, if you look closer you might find some hexadecimal in there somewhere'

There is enough in the Microsoft stack to do good architecture, particularly if you look at the breadth (don't try and do everything in MOSS only) and so much that no single person can ever be considered a specialist.  Architectural correctness aside, from a career point of view this is risky as single vendor skillsets are frowned upon - particularly if it is Microsoft (see Fire and Motion).

I recently did work on a project with an Oracle database partly to get the experience - frankly I was not impressed and failed to see what the big deal about Oracle is.  Yes, it did help me understand how Oracle works - Yes, I can write some code in PL/SQL - Yes, I had to wrestle with it to grok it.  Maybe it made me a better architect but if I had spent the time learning (say) the ASP MVC framework instead of fighting with Oracle, my architectural skills would have progressed further, and in a better direction.

Don't get too hang up on learning non Microsoft technologies, there is a lot of noise out there and you shouldn't give in to the pressure.