1000 days of .NET recruitment

From a recruitment perspective, it’s fair to say that the demand for the .NET skill set is at a high. It’s been increasing ever since 2012 and looks set to continue well into 2015. To celebrate my 1000 days of recruiting .NET developers in Yorkshire, I thought it would be interesting to chat to a few of my developer contacts to gain their thoughts on the changes over the past few years and what they are looking forward to. The panel: Simon Cooper - Lead .NET developer in a permanent role

Stuart Sklinar - .NET systems developer in a permanent role

Jonathan McHale - Contract .NET developer

Richard Brown - Senior .NET Developer in a permanent role

1. What do you think have been the most significant changes with regards to .NET during the

past few years? Simon: I think the most significant changes have been in 2 areas:

1) Adopting contributions and common extensions of their products into the core products, things like Owin and AttributeRouting

2) Moving tooling into modular style implementations so they can be released independent of

the .Net Framework, given us faster turnarounds on fixes and new features It has made it an exciting time to be a Microsoft stack developer; there are lots of new features heading our way. Stuart: LINQ and NuGet package management. Also, the ease of use with parallel functionality as to how it was before. Entity Framework has come on tons too! Jonathan: For me the instruction of await/async operators was a biggy. Not only for improving performance and user experience, but it’s extremely useful for speeding up integration with multiple/numerous legacy apps or services. And the increasing trend of using the likes of Knockout (MVVM) with ASP.NET MVC, great for UI development and experience. I'd also say that F# is seemingly on the up, being integrated more and more with C# projects, and it's great that the two languages are being used together more.

Richard: Support for concurrency. The introduction of the Task Parallel Library and thread-safe collections in .NET 4, and async/await features in C# 5 have made writing multi-threaded code much less daunting than it used to be. NuGet has also been a big game changer as it has become much easier for people to share code.

2. We have recently had the announcement that .NET will become OpenSource. What does this

mean to the developer community? Simon: The moving of the .Net framework to open source I think will have quite a big impact in certain areas. Most notably, we might soon see ports of the .Net framework that run natively on

Mac/Linux. We might see micro builds of the framework being developed that reduce the memory and disk footprint to make it run on ever smaller server hardware. It also opens up a possibility that we may get some existing modules of the framework replaced with different implementations; organisations picking and choosing the best parts of the framework for their own needs. Stuart: For me, the large movement and hopefully drive of the Mono Project, should pick up some speed now! All in all, it's great they're becoming more open. Jonathan: I'd have thought they'd have chosen TFS mind …seriously, this is mind-boggling. I can only see it working in their favour in the long run and it would mean the top devs can push things into the .NET stack (potentially) a lot quicker. In my mind it would look a bit like the Fedora/Redhat pattern with regards to exciting and cutting-edge contributed features making their way into the main releases. Whether it will end up looking like that is another matter.

Richard: Hopefully it will mean that more developers choose .NET over something like Java (I think

this is Microsoft’s’ hope anyway). As a developer it means I can look at the .NET source code and see

how the libraries work at a detailed level. I’m hoping this will make me a better developer.

3. As someone who has moved jobs during this time, what difference have you noticed when it

comes to seeking a new role? Simon: Apart from seeing a massive rise in the amount of MVC work that seems to be out there, there hasn’t been much change when it comes to looking for a role. Less emphasis is placed on language versions than in the past; you rarely see Proficiency in C# v4 or v5 as the small amount of changes made in each iteration doesn’t really present a deal breaker when applying for a role.

Richard: The biggest difference is the number of roles looking for experience with test-driven development (TDD). This wasn’t the case a few years ago. It also seems that some MVC knowledge is pretty much a given.

4. What further changes or updates would you like to see within .NET over the coming months? Stuart: I'd like to see more about TFS (Team Foundation Server) and more about ASP VNext and Roslyn - I'm keen to see some dates! Jonathan: No idea but I imagine that the impact on Mono/Xamarin will be huge. I did suspect that Microsoft would end up swallowing Xamarin but that may not be the case anymore. Many thanks to Si, Stu, Jon and Richard for their contributions! If you’re interested in writing a guest blog for ReThink Recruitment within any area of development, please get in touch. If you’re looking to take the next step in your development career or would like some advice on the marketplace in Yorkshire, please contact Sam Wilkinson on 0161 214 7450 / swilkinson@rethink-recruitment.com