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.NET Programmers In Demand, Despite MS Moves To Metro
mikejuk writes "Are you a newbie programmer looking for a job? It seems your best bet is to opt for .NET. According to technical jobs website Dice.com, companies in the U.S. have posted more than 10,000 positions requesting .NET experience — a 25 percent increase compared to last year's .NET job count. So Microsoft may want us to move on to Metro but the rest of the world seems to want to stay with .NET."
No one likes to set up for one system, put all their resources into learning and developing it, and then have to move to a new one just because MS wants to make more money.
Isn't Metro just a different GUI library on top of .Net?
Of *course* .NET programmers are demand 'despite the move to metro'. Windows 8 isn't going to be release for at least a year, and Windows shops need software built *now*.
I mean, c'mon... that's not even wrong!
You can write Metro apps in .NET
Metro is merely a new style of app interface that can be written using .NET, not a replacement for it.
.NET is pretty much a winner in my opinion. There is a heavy demand for it, and if you know C# you pretty much know Java (and vice versa).
I don't know the point in trying to move people off something which works already. Also the new metrosexual UI is garbage and I'm hoping most people will give it a miss, and anyway tech companies aren't generally eager to move off a working system.
Metro replace .NET? Maybe you meant to say Silverlight, WPF, or Winforms. .NET is far too general a word.
The are still people using VB6...
Metro is a UI on top of Windows 8.
WinRT is the new Windows 8 runtime, which will be accessible by C++, C# and any .Net language. The .Net standard libraries will be available for Windows 8 Desktop applications but not for Metro applications, which will be written targeting WinRT.
So, the summary is wrong because: .Net-related skills remain central in Windows 8 even when targeting Metro
a) Metro is not a development framework
b)
My book: Friendly F#, fun with game development and XNA; my game: Galaxy Wars by VSTeam; my gamedev language: Casanova.
The windows 8 only is a big trun off.
And the Must be in app store is a other killer as well. No way adobe will give MS 30% the cost of the CS pack just to have a Metro Photoshop.
Windows 8 isn't out yet! Right now it is just a developer preview. That means it isn't even in beta yet, it is still effectively alpha, meaning feature incomplete. They just want people to be able to start learning the new development environment that will be coming. It has a long way to go before it is out on the desktop (a year or more). Of course even once it is out, it has a longer way to widespread adoption. It'll be several years before lots of desktops feature Metro.
So why in the hell would businesses be looking for Metro programmers now even if it was a new programming method (which you correctly point out it is not)? They aren't going to suddenly switch all their development to a product that hasn't been released.
From the article's resumes pie chart: experience with .NET -- 10+ years? .NET 1.0 was released in 2002. Hmm.
Whenever I want to throw together a really quick internal tool, and there isn't a really obvious template program I can use, the .Net framework really is great for:
- drawing up a few texboxes and buttons
- adding a property.settings var so it'll remember its state between uses
- adding a bit of codebehind, doing some interactive debugging (change code as its running)
- then sending it to the user and going through an iteration or two of quick fixes before adding it to our toolset.
Yes, you can do the same with most languages, but it really is enticing to use when you just want a quick tool created.
Ryan Fenton
The only valid statement here is .Net developers in demand. By the way, we're one of the companies contributing to that demand - if you're good with ASP.Net, we'd like to hear from you.
Metro was just announced and the demand hasn't caught on, plus .NET is used for a lot more than home-end UI applications.
This post is akin to me hearing that a new form of candy has been developed and almost immediately asking, "The sale of chocolate is going up. There's a new kind of candy out there that needs much development and people are still eating chocolate... and more of it! What is going on?"
The article mentions nothing about Metro anyway. WTF?
*head-desk*
Nobody ever got fired for recommending IB^H^HMicrosoft.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I found the hacker news discussion of it quite informative: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3071647
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Don't be so keen to jump into the golden cage, people. It's not in our best long term interest.
...doesn't mean everyone will be using it. Windows 7 is only what, 2 or 3 years old? It's just starting to gain steam but most of the world still runs XP. Once the masses see that the start menu is gone and has been replaced by this huge, gawdy menu that takes up THE_ENTIRE_SCREEN, they won't be in any hurry to upgrade. 8 is going to go over like Win ME.
slashdot screwed it up again. they don't understand, but they have OPINIONS. fu slashdot!
For $25K/yr.
That's why there are so many H1-b visa approvals. Those jobs pay for crap, on average, so only someone used to non-US living can afford to accept them.
Obviously, I'm understanding the real salaries - probably closer to $40K average, but to live comfortable in a metro area in the USA, $55K+ is needed, IMHO, unless you want to live next to drug dealers and people who bag groceries full time at the local walmart. It isn't enough.
Starting salaries for college grades ready to start programming here are north of $50K/yr. My friends - some writing .NET apps earn over $100K/yr with a few in the $140+K/yr range, but those aren't the jobs posted on Dice or Monster or whatever job site.
They are also still on demand.
Companies want people to work on the things they already have vs the things that are a year away? No way! Color me amazed.
What's the matter Slashdot, not enough Microsoft bashing this week to keep the ad numbers up?
.NET obsolete? Next you'll be claiming Microsoft has abandoned Silverlight!
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Even assuming Metro stuff was fundamentally not .NET, we are talking about a technology that isn't going to be in anyone's production environment for over a year or two. People have stuff to get done today.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The reason is that Metro has not yet proven itself, and companies are still holding on to the promises of .NET as a stable platform, write once run everywhere, universal look and feel, faster development, and security. That may or may not be the reality, but that's how it was pitched, and that's what the companies believe. They're not going to move their programmers over to a new platform that is unproven in these fields and sacrifice the experience in a platform that they have already invested their code and research into which supposedly already suits their needs. They're just wondering how Metro improves on that, and right now it all seems like hyperbole and pie in the sky promises, not to mention that it has no traction right now in the commercial market.
Twinstiq, game news
"WANTED: WinRT developer with 10 years of experience!"
sounds pretty fucking stupid, no? of course they're looking for people with .net experience even if they're going to target that newfangled stuff. besides, it's new stuff, the old pro's should be able to pick it up. and wtf do you think the headhunters writing those proxy job adverts know? fucking nothing on top of a fuck nothing nottinghill notter.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
May be no one is posting jobs yet because Win8 won't until late next year. There is effectively zero demand.
Also, Metro is just an API. In the same way you can make a .Net Console or WinForm or WPF or Service, .Net can also target Metro
25% increase? Pfft. Scala job postings went up ~300% over the same period. The absolute numbers tell more of the story.
I am trolling
Slashdot just did a survey, that asked whether readers would recommend Slashdot to others. Here is a perfect example of why I answered No to that question, and would have picked Hell No if that option had been in the survey. An increase in job postings for .Net is newsworthy on a "news for nerds" site. Totally ignorant, misinformed, clueless, stupid, arrogant and worthless editorializing, in the article and the headline, is not at all news for nerds, nor is it stuff that matters. Not only is the commentary about Metro completely wrong, so is the "home for newbies" slant. The linked article clearly indicates that more than 70% of resume searches in .Net are for developers with at least four years of experience. Obviously it's impossible to have four years experience with Metro, but it is entirely possible to have been using .Net for a decade now. The article has no mention at all of Metro. The article also mentioned an utterly ignorant, untrue, trite fear of .Net developers: that their skills do not carry over to other platforms. I guess this means a lot of fearful .Net developer who have never heard of Java? Where does Slashdot get the editors to approve this kind of junk?
Okay, if .NET is so awesome--why doesn't Microsoft itself use it? Neither Windows 7 or 8 were written in .NET. Office is not written in .NET.
You quote a statistic that Dice includes a lot more .NET positions than last year--but that's because the economy itself is picking up--not because there is any special need for .NET.
In fact, the opposite is true. In a word: Silverlight. You know that Metro is the way forward and Metro will not use Silverlight, which is already a second-class citizen in the Microsoft stack.
I know several people who are learning to program and they know there are many languages they should learn: Java, PHP and Ruby. None of them need .NET.
You apparently did not hear Mark Andreasson's comment that of all the startups he funds--not one uses a single product from Microsoft. .NET is dying and is on fumes now.
Usually I'd attempt to explain why an article is just a load of rubbish from someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, but today I think I'll just leave it at that. Come on Slashdot!
Why in your right mind would be using any of these?
please take this down it is rubbish .net going to use winRT the same C++
any thing to bash MS
So, the C# devs are going to be sent down the same chute as the Visual Basic 6 devs, the J# devs, the VBScript devs, the Silverlight devs and the WPF devs (Oops. Sorry. Metro's the thing now). And you were expecting....?
Usually a MS programming language dies because of MSs own pathetic marketing missteps that "nobody could have foreseen". Add to that an internal programming culture still dominated by C++ guys who figure that if you're not managing your own memory with pointers, you're not really *coding* by god! and you've got an ongoing recipe for alienating the 95% of developers who actually get a useful app out the door (Hint. These are almost *never* the C++ crowd). It never seems to occur to any of those geniuses at Microsoft that you could just EXTEND an existing language rather than replace it wholesale or "deprecate" it (e.g. the wholly unnecessary and valueless new syntax of powershell rather than the improvement or extension of VBScript).
Fortunately, the Android is out, so there's somewhere to go. Java is being reworked for the desktop. There are alternatives. The best thing any developer can do for themselves is to back away from any MS development language and platform until such time as Microsoft proves sane and sensible - something that hasn't been happening for the last decade.
If only they would let us mod these idiotic summaries into oblivion. It doesn't even deserve a rating as high as troll. People like mikejuk who post FUD like this should just be prevented from submitting or posting in future.
This isn't insightful. It's plain wrong. As someone who attended the Build conference and spoke directly with several Microsoft program managers, I can attest that Metro/WinRT is not a replacement for .NET. I asked several times something like "But can I do Q in the sandbox?" and they would say "No, in that case use regular .NET to do Q and distribute your apps through traditional channels (or link to the installer in the app store)." I never got the impression that Metro was always the preferred approach, just the preferred approach for slate devices.
I don't know what Microsoft wants to do in the future past Windows 8. Maybe you're right, and Microsoft wants to give up their stronghold on enterprise applications that have certain hardware or interoperability requirements not allowed by Metro, so that they get control over tablet apps. But I'm not betting the bank on that.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Metro apps are for mobile devices, that is why Windows 8 comes with two interfaces. There are many things one cannot do in HTML5/Javascript.
(NOTE: Unity wouldn't fit in the subject, so I used Qt)
And thats a stupid statement, just like the article title.
Metro is a user interface, not an entire programming environment composed of several languages and thousands of libraries.
Who ever wrote the title or has any such concern has absolutely no idea what Metro and/or the .NET system is.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
A nice rant, except for the little tidbit that C# (and VB) is fully supported for Metro apps.
Metro is a user interface, not an entire programming environment composed of several languages and thousands of libraries.
Metro isn't, but WinRT is.
Ironic, much?
When I left college (note the absence of the phrase "graduated from"), I needed an income. I made it writing VB/VBA/ASP apps tied to SQL Server databases. And I made a very fine income. Then when .NET came out, I "upgraded" to C#, and was very happy with it. I have to be reminded once in a while that we're in a recession. I've spent the better part of the last 20 years on Windows because that's where I felt I was in the most stable business environment.
Last week, I bought a PHP/PostgreSQL book for my current project on Linux/Apache2.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
and the money will start to follow wherever Microsoft's Piper plays!
http://www.gibby.net.au
If your C++ code has the same layout as your C# code, you're not architecting your code to take advantage of multiple inheritance and missing out on the whole point of using C++ instead of C# or Java.
C# is a nice language, but I'm not interested in locking myself to the Microsoft environment. And the runtime leaves a lot to be desired. For example, the default behaviour is to open a file with a lock on it, even if you only read the file. While file locking semantics are very useful for programming, they should not be the default. At very least, the default should be either a read lock or a write lock based on your file opening flags.
And don't get me started about Mono. Great idea, lousy implementation. Completely and utterly USELESS for multi-threaded programming in a server environment where you expect more than a half dozen or so threads.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Any recommendations?
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Metro is dead on arrival. It is totally unsuitable for anything other than touchscreen tablets, it is incompatible with existing Windows software, it is not very well suited to actually getting productive work done and the mandatory 30% cut to Microsoft will turn off developers in droves. I expect that businesses will skip Windows 8 and will stick with Windows 7 forever just like they did with XP. In any case I think that tablets are a passing fad which will vanish a few years from now.
Why do you hold such hostility towards your fellow humans? I thought you were a commie..
I use C. All this new high fangled object orientation is fudgesticks!
Gosh I just can't see why people see Java as the non-evil-corporation alternative! It's oracle for heavens sake, if you think microsoft screws developers on puropose you better believe Oracle does it for fun.
So the developers of the world are getting excited about the next big thing and are trying to cross-train to MS's new hotness.
But the companies of the world are still using their .Net apps, and still want them to be developed.
There is a lag between the two. During the lag period, there will be a high demand for developers of the old technology.
This is always the case when this kind of transition happens. The same happened when .Net came out -- VB6 devs* found themselves more and more in demand as the best of them jumped ship early to learn .Net. Those who remained did quite well out of the situation for a couple of years. But after that time the bottom dropped out of the VB6 jobs market fairly quickly, leaving those who hadn't switched struggling.
* (note re the VB6 devs, I use the term 'devs' in its loosest possible sense)
Regardless of whether WPF dies, ASP.NET Web Services are going to drive data to whatever UI layer is needed for some time to come. If it's WCF, WCF Rest, ASMX or an http handler who cares?
There seems to be a lot of FUD flying around this article & in the comments. It's probably a sign Microsoft are actually doing something right when people go out of their way to distort the truth.
throw new NoSignatureException();
who are tirelessly shitting up technology for the rest of mankind
Thats what you get for creating a successfull product that people want. Those idiots !
I thought you weren't a troll... sorry for the confusion.
A lot of .NET developers create ASP.NET Web applications, and those developers aren't going to suddenly switch from making Web apps to making Windows 8 Metro applications.
"Are you a newbie programmer looking for a job? It seems your best bet is to ... have ... .NET experience"
.net programmer?"
Are you a newbie programmer? Your best bet would be to not be a newbie programmer, and instead be experienced.
Uh, duh? Maybe this should read "Are you a
just sayin.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
As others have pointed out, this article is flawed. I bet a good 80% of those .NET jobs are actually ASP.NET jobs.
Why is anyone in their right mind writing applications in a systems programming language that is C++. C# is an application language, and C++ is a systems language.
I would like to have, in C++, these things that C# already has:
1) Sane compilation. Why must I still be doing #if INCLUDED in 2011?
2) Property inspection and other run time type inspection and dynamic invocation facilities.
3) datetime, decimal.
4) C# strings are better than C++ strings
5) Class extensions
6) Anonymous types, and as a consequence, LINQ
7) nullable types
8) Sane array and class construction syntax in code
C# does do some stuff that is kinda sucky compared to C++. I still miss multiple inheritance from time to time. But,
all in all, C# is just better.
This is my sig.
Sort of a side note, I got denied an interview about a year ago because I couldn't explain well enough to the recruiter that no one could have 4 years experience with .NET 4.0. I tried to explain that I've worked with .NET since v1.1 and many other languages before that; however, that did not seem to work. "Well", she said, " the company wants someone with 4 years experience with .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010". (The logic that it's CALLED 2010 and the current year was 2010 didn't help either for some reason).
Guess I'll try to re-apply in 3 more years.