Paul Ballard's WebLog

I am pleased to announce that I will be speaking at two major conferences this year in addition to my regular round of User Group presentations. 

My brother has decided that he wants to learn about .NET programming and asked if I could help him learn about VB.NET. Now the last time I taught him anything it was how to play chess when we were teenagers and after just three months he was routinely kicking my butt. I wanted to make sure he got started off on the right foot and went to the local bookstore to get him a book on learning VB.NET.

While parusing the books though, I realized that in an entire shelf of books specific to VB.NET, published by companies like Wrox, Microsoft Press, and Sams, not ONE SINGLE BOOK contained even a chapter on object oriented programming. Not one!

Thinking this must be an oversight I checked the C# books and sure enough, the books I checked all had chapters on object oriented programming. Why then don't VB.NET books contain at least a mention of OO? If not the publishers then surely the authors should understand the importance of laying the proper foundation before diving into the WinForms designer or ADO.NET. Don't they?

That's not to say that books on OO with VB.NET don't exist. My buddy Dan Clark wrote a good one and I know that there are others. But in one of the biggest stores of the second largest bookstore chain in the country in the 4th largest city in the country, I couldn't find a single book on VB.NET that included object oriented programming. If there is a message in there somewhere, I really don't like it.

Yes, it looks to be a banner year and so we're staffing up again. I have several clients located all over the US that are in need of .NET expertise. Here's a short list of positions I have available. If you're interested, just send me an email via the blog and I'll get back to you.

Thanks,
Paul Ballard

Dallas

• Jr. .NET Dev - Some C# and Windows dev experience preferred. Most important aspect is a desire to learn and be productive fast.
• Sr. .NET Dev - At least 3 years of .NET experience preferrable in C# with Windows Forms development. BizTalk experience is a plus.
• Sr. ASP.NET Dev - At least 2 years of experience developing ASP.NET applications in C#. .NET 2.0 exposure is a plus.

Sr. .NET Architect - This is a very strategic position and requires somebody with advanced knowledge of .NET as well as experience building large scale distributed systems. 10 years of overall experience required with at least 3 of those at an architect level.

.NET Technical Evangelist - This position is for somebody with excellent technical skills as well as communication skills. Must have experience writing technical articles for publication. Advanced .NET knowledge is also required.

I recently spoke at the Dallas .NET User Group on Windows Workflow Foundation.  The demos I did, while fairly simple and high level, did show a number of interesting features in the Beta 2 version of Windows Workflow including:

A friend sent me this link for a new conference designed for those of us who just don't get modern development methodologies.  Get your tickets now for Waterfall 2006.

Well, it's all over now.  I've officially resigned my position as Editor of TheServerSide.NET.  It was a great experience and I'm glad I had the opportunity to work on the site.  I've learned a lot about what it takes to provide consistent quality content and how that sometimes conflicts with the equally reasonable requirement to make money and sell ad space.  Balancing those two objectives while walking the tightrope of my MVP NDA was often a bit tricky, but overall it's been a great experience.  Now it's time for me to move on and make room for some new blood to re-invogorate the site.  For those of you who visited TSS.NET in the past year or so, I thank you very much.

I am very honored to have been chosen to receive the Microsoft MVP Award (Visual Developer - Visual Basic) again this year.  I look forward to this being a great year and have lots of community based projects planned.  So... <Watch This Space>

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