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Category Archives: .NET

First day at my new job

I started a new job today as a .NET developer. And boy was it a learning curve. For the past 7 months I’ve been used to writing spaghetti code, duplicate code all over the place, tightly coupling all tiers to one another. And I got used to this; accepted this.

Things are different at my new place of work. Everything is an object. I have missed nice object-oriented code. But for sure, I am out of practice.

Today has been one hell of a learning curve and I expect this to carry on for the next few months. There’s so much I don’t know. On top of learning Microsoft tools (Visual Studio 2005, MS SQL 2000 / 2005, Team Server, Source Safe, etc…), I’ve got to pick up C# and learn the company’s internal suite of products inside out. I love a challenge but dislike being a total newbie. My brain was worn out at the end of today just through the sheer amount of new information it was trying to take on board.

It’s company tradition that new guys, like me, schedule a 15 minute meeting with every member of the company in order to introduce myself and learn what everyone’s role is. I managed to speak to 6 people this afternoon, that’s just under half the workforce. Everyone I met was very friendly and far too clever. How am I going to fit in?

All in all, I’m very happy to have moved and will just have to go through the motions of being a total newbie.

Learning Dot Net

Tomorrow it will be a month since I started my first job as a developer. I haven't done anything challenging, just simple HTML and CSS coding, plus working with my company's proprietary CMS, which, I must say, is pretty awful. There's a lot of hoops to jump through in order to write a new page, and the templates, which are written in VB script, are some of the worst examples of code I've seen. Based on the 3 projects I've worked on so far, I get a feeling that the quality isn't going to change. I guess this is reality.

Today I started on a new project, a web application written in ASP.NET using C#. I'm at a point where I understand most of what the code is doing, however, I can't say I am a fan of what goes on under the hood. The HTML is bastardised when using web forms and controls. Visual Studio "helps" by changing valid HTML into invalid HTML, and boy, does that annoy. The project I'm working on was 90% completed by a contractor a couple of months ago. He's not there anymore. Now the client wants project completion, so one of my project managers has asked me to finish it off, working to a "fix list". It turns out that the contractor wasn't very good at displaying his handy work to the browser. Tables galore and structural tags used for presentational purposes, plus awkward page flows that lead to user confusion.

I've just printed the following ASP.NET tutorials for reading on the bus to work tomorrow morning.

Hopefully these Sitepoint tutorials, which are actually the first four chapters of a book, will prove helpful in how to develop the ASP.NET way. I'm not convinced as of yet.