It's software they used to charge for that is now being given away. I'm sure you can find something negative about it if you want. It's also missing load testing tools, code diagrams, all the architect tools, etc.

According to MS it is basically the same as Professional.

I hope the article is exaggerating a bit, but I agree with the general statement. After 4 years of writing arrays and data structures and OS fundamentals I got out of school and landed a VB.Net job as a contractor on a team of 1 to build a web app. I had never written in .Net or any decent OO language (VB6 doesn't count). Most of our C++ in college was all functional recursive stuff. I had a ton of concepts to learn, an IDE to understand, deployment to think about, SOLID principles, etc. A friend of mine did a vocational school instead and hit the ground running when he finished. 10 years later we've both ended up as strong technologists but I would have had a much easier go had I learned things applicable upside of academia. I think the only thing I learned from my 4 year BS degree (no pun intended) that I haven't relearned is what O(n) means.

Based on this article, I'd say bad writers shouldn't use blog engines.

And another, if the Round Rock area counts. :) Every time I've been in our MS store it's been fairly busy with sales. I'm trying to hold out for a Gen 2 Pro to replace my ultrabook, but we'll see...

If you did that to my codebase I'd probably avoid working with you as much as possible. You can always throw hardware at code performance. You can't throw hardware at code readability.

We looked into this in our office. Looking at Phonegap, Titanium, and Xamarin, they still all require a Mac OS. I know you need one to sign and submit to the store, but reading the product documentation I was under the impression that you couldn't even do the client dev without a Mac since you can't plug into the iOS SDK otherwise. If I'm mistaken, that would be great news.

As someone who started trying TDD last Feb but really hit it hard on a project a few months ago, here's my takeaway regarding some of the cons. UI testing is getting more and less of a problem. Frameworks like MVC are making it so that if things are written well there should be very little view logic in your controller code. I'm incredibly grateful to no longer have to see code like (if data = 37 then control.hide()) or something similar. On the other hand, so much logic is happening in Javascript now that unless you're using something like QUnit (and enforcing it among the teams) you're back to square one. I'd argue TDD does save time, but that time is manifested as time you didn't have to spend researching, finding, fixing, testing, and deploying a bug. We've just started TDD on a project and I've seen what happens when tests are run and I've seen the case where we've chased a bug only to be frustrated that had the developer who changed the feature run the tests (or if the automation had run it...different problem heh) we'd have saved a few hours. TDD certainly increases your dev time though, no question there. Speaking from a .NET perspective, with things like RhinoMocks and Moq, not having a mocking framework really shouldn't be an excuse. And if you're doing IoC you have Ninject, StructureMap, etc., so building apps in such a way that you can use a mocked db layer or a real one should also be fairly simple. My two cents.

While just about everyone on this thread is correct that it's extremely unlikely (unheard of?) to get that sort of salary for that sort of experience, I think it's worth noting that if you excel at the core components of your job and you're aggressive in solving problems for the organization outside of your "to-do" list and you stay on top of market trends and new tech, you can advance your salary pretty quickly. I've been fortunate that at the different shops I've worked in there's always been a few new technologies I haven't fooled with before that I quickly became proficient in, so it's one more thing to have on my resume, and it usually pays off when it's time to do something different. (I also benefit from being restless and having held 4 different positions in 6 years with significant increases on each hop).

Except they aren't. It may be that customers are more familiar with Flash than Silverlight, but the install process is incredibly similar. Also, Silverlight did not require me to restart my browser the last time I installed it.

I agree that joking aside, you don't want to make yourself look incompetent. The two best strategies for getting out of a stuck position is asking for more money or quitting. Be prepared to call their bluff if they agree to your compensation demands though...if no amount of money could make you stay, then just put in your notice once you find something. I finally got out of my dead-end by telling the client I was burnt out on the year extension and couldn't continue, and delivering the same message to my consulting house. Once they understood that it was an irreperable problem, my consulting house pulled me. The client never did train a replacement and had me doing piddly tasks until the last day, and now they're re-writing the system to remove a core component no one else at the shop understands. But you can only do so much...

My expereinces have been very similar. Though I've seen bad coders homegrown as well (and godawful architects, but that is another story entirely), sadly every outsourced developer I've worked with has been undertrained, underbid, copypasta fanatics, and often involved in some shady practices (we had to slice a dev team by 33% because we found our "mid-level developers" we phone interviewed couldn't write simple C# code or valid XML). As long as the majority of outsourcing companies are taking advantage of the West's desire for cheap labor (all programmers are the same right?) and are cranking people out with inflated titles and fabricated knowledge to mqake the sale, this will continue. I hope Christian's right about the gap closing, but I know I couldn't live on the $30k/yr they were paying my outsourced peer, so that gap's gonna have to do a fair amount of closing on the upside.

Because the current WF is a steaming pile in certain scenarios, such as having to update existing persisted workflows. I hate they are re-writing it (and breaking everything existing), but it's proof that WF wasn't ready when they pushed it out the door. The fact that many Microsoft MVPs and support people scratch their heads when you deep-dive into WF problems says a lot. I've been wanting to get into WPF...played with it a tiny bit within and without the context of SIlverlight. Are the major bugs documented somewhere that can be eyeballed?

I hate cert tests because they do extra time and the certs themselves have an artificial value thanks to the large number of developers that are certified in everything but can't sit down at a computer and write code to save their lives (which leads me to why I hhate outsourcing, but a topic for another day...) I have MCTS Web 2.0 and MCTS WCF. Studying materials are accessible via the MS Press books (which comes with a practice test if you buy the hardcopy, and the practice test questions are sometimes duplicated on the actual exam (!!!)) and if you really wanna be certain, Transcender or something similar. As long as MS is doing the second-shot promotion, this is a perfect time to get it out of the way. I can say begrudgingly that the WCF studying gave me the knowledge I needed to successfully convert our ASMX web service over to POX/REST for a specific client. Lot less googling and trial/error to build. And yes, if you are doing it I would request reimbursement on your expenses (book, exam fee, maybe Transcender?) Good luck!

Matt MacDonald has a Pro WPF book that addresses how to do MDI in WPF. http://www.apress.com/book/view/9781590599556[^] Wanna say it's in Ch 3 or 4. I was able to try it out and see it work, but then I'm not an MDI guru so maybe it has limitations I'm unaware of.

I had a lot of luck in the past with my Toshiba Tecra M9. I went out yesterday to buy a second laptop and settled on the Toshiba Satellite E105. It's sleek, it's small (14.1"), nice processor, 4gb ram, 320gb hd (plenty for development), and according to specs as well as CNET reviews it has an incredible battery life. I haven't tested that yet. Best part is it was only $800. So far, the only complaint I have is a 5400rpm drive when I could have bought a Dell with a 7200rpm and a stronger video card, but I don't plan to game and losing close ot have of the battery time for a slightly faster hd isn't worth it in my book.

To be fair, Silverlight does bring web development a bit closer to WinForms since the need to manage state isn't as big of an issue. But as a guy stuck in "post-production support" (read: app is in the shitter) of an application that decided to lead the way and use Windows Workflow even though no one knew anything about it, I agree with the intent of this post 100%. There is sooo much I wish I had known back when the decision was made. I still can't decide if I like WF as a tech but our implementation sucks, or if the tech sucks as well.

This happened to me once on a production database. Your heart feels really weird sitting in your stomach as you watch every row in production get updated.

I can't decide between these three - maybe it would depend on why I was on Death Row? Alice In Chains - Dirt Metallica - Ride The Lightning Nine Inch Nails - Gave Up

I have to disagree here. WCF is incredibly useful if you're doing any kind of app-to-app communication other than consuming your own web services. Interoperability, non-http chatter, and the control you get over the wire all are pretty nice. We have a web service that has to be consumed by a Java client with very specific requirements that was much easier to do with WCF than ASMX. Also, WCF serialization is much better than the serialization done by ASMX in my opinion. We have a production app using WF right now. I'd be a liar if I said it was the greatest tool in the world, but when dealing with state machines and a persistent process where multiple users have to interact with the message, it does have its uses and I think ultimately we chose the right technology (even if we didn't architect it too well initially). WF's big hurdles are the learning curve, the extremely poor performance of the designer, and the fact that it's easy to screw things up. It's not the best API in the world, which is why I think MS is almost starting over with 4.0. But I wouldn't call it crap either. Like others have said though, LINQ is huge. Even if you're not doing anything other than LINQ to Objects (which is all we've been able to implement thus far) it's a huge productivity boost once you learn it. I'd still stay away from the data side until MS figures out what it's doing with EF and what future LINQ to SQL has, but LINQ to Objects and LINQ to XML are both fantastic tools.