Last week i mentioned there may be a Web Dev job going at my work (Q2 Solutions in Milton), this is now a reality.

So if anyone wants to work for an awesome company with a great bunch of co-workers and an excellent boss, send your resume/CV to zane@q2solutions.com.au (Zane Knight, the boss)

You will maninly be working in ASP.NET 2.0 (maybe 3.5 soon) on 1 or 2 main products (and a few other smaller side products).

If you happen to have experience in PowerBuilder applications, you will certainly have a much better chance of getting the job as we are also looking for someone to do some work in that.

There is an ad on Seek and a bit of urgency to find someone (before guy leaving actually leaves so there can be some training/handover), so get in as fast as you can for a chance at a great job with a good future.

what lang mate? c# or vb.net? also, whats your name?

VB.NET

My name is Simon Gould. Been here 3 years so far.

Still looking for someone. Really want to get someone in soon before we start next version in a week or 2.

Surprised at the lack of interest, only a few people have applied so far.

And what's wrong with them? Who do you think you are, Australia's Got Talent? ASP.net is rare and unusual, most programmers don't care for it, you should be thrilled you got anyone at all.

as usual, you'd probably get more people if you put some idea of salary in the post

Didn't realise ASP.NET was so rare. It's a piss-easy language to use to do powerful stuff.

Previous times we had heaps of people apply, must just be a quiet period.

Yeah, i know salary helps but thats not really in my knowledge. Plus someone who is a junior and someone who is a senior get much different salary.

Didn't realise ASP.NET was so rare. It's a piss-easy language framework to use to do powerful stuff.

It shouldn't be unusual, but it is. Most of the web development industry in Australia has been thoroughly evangelised away from Microsoft technology. Enterprise IT managers however quite like .Net and the net result is a shortage of .Net devs across the board.

Have a look at a recruitment website; big $ at the moment for competent .Net devs be it web or application focused.

I learned ASP.NET about 5 years ago, but the idea of getting back into that, and working with .net gives me a weird feeling in the gut, you know...? Because I work with PHP atm, there's a certain level of comfort there. :/ Probably would take a sack of gold to get the attention of people who don't really want to work outside their comfort zone.

I've worked in pretty much every language over the years (web and application) and i do find ASP.NET (in VB.NET) to be quite nice. PHP was good too i guess.

And what's wrong with them? Who do you think you are, Australia's Got Talent? ASP.net is rare and unusual, most programmers don't care for it, you should be thrilled you got anyone at all.

ASP.NET is not rare, nor is organisations basing their coding regime around MS web development environs.

I don't know if people realise but small development companies don't use MS tools as they are expensive to license and maintain whereas in Enterprise computing the majority is MS based and PHP is rare to find. In a nutshell large orgainsations use MS whereas small organisations tend to use Open Source.



last edited by Some Fat Bastard at 19:12:41 06/May/08

very keen, just wont be home till sept!

got 5years dot net experience, 2years asp.net. good thing learning asp.net, is you can develop on sharepoint and dynmics. sharepoint developers pull £300+ a day here.

edit: sent him an email anyway, hope he has something in 6months time.

last edited by mooby at 20:17:43 06/May/08

Oh the work is out there, clearly. But obviously there are factors behind this low interest in Mantis' offer.

I don't know if people realise but small development companies don't use MS tools as they are expensive to license and maintain

There are costs with licensing, but their relativly small. £600 a year for visual stuido and all the toys. The support you get off MS is unbelivable.

I recently developed on MS sharepoint. The SDK was incrediable. EVERY method had a good description and example code in c# and vb.net.

I've also found this true for third party controls. Atalasofts sdk was brilliant. Gimp on the other hand, was a joke.

"I don't know if people realise but small development companies don't use MS tools as they are expensive to license and maintain whereas in Enterprise computing the majority is MS based and PHP is rare to find. In a nutshell large orgainsations use MS where as small organisations tend to use Open Source. "

What about J2EE?



Anyway, If I hear of any .net devs looking for work ill point this out

P.S. Props to your boss for having an awesome name.

last edited by simul at 20:36:59 06/May/08

I don't know if people realise but small development companies don't use MS tools as they are expensive to license and maintain whereas in Enterprise computing the majority is MS based and PHP is rare to find. In a nutshell large orgainsations use MS where as small organisations tend to use Open Source.

Well practically every MS tool now has a fully-functional Express version. C#, ASP.Net, VB.Net etc. Some non-core features such as source control for the IDE, development on mobile devices, Replication for SQL Server, development for Office are not available but that stuff should not matter for the little guys.

That said Visual Studio Professional Edition is quite accessible for small business at ~1100-1400 AUD per seat. Once you have bought a license then the upgrade every 2-3 years is about half he retail price. Hell, a start-up could grab the 90 day free trial of Visual Studio - if you're not in business after 90 days then no foul!

I left Uni a PHP / Open Source guy and worked for a big evil MS dev shop for a few years. I know a lot of it is just familiarity but I just couldn't go back now - I've turned work away because the client had a fixation with OS languages.

last edited by Hogfather at 08:24:08 07/May/08

There is a whole lot more that goes with a MS development environment such as Server OS Licenses, SQL Server licenses, usually MS Office licenses, possibly Visio Licenses (if you do proper and full on Systems Analysis and Design), MS Project (if you do proper Project Management). Now multiply some of these licenses, such as VS Pro, Office and such by the number of developers and it costs the owner of the business considerable sums.

Add to this if you are developing web applications the higher cost imposed with hosting MS Environments as opposed to linux environments especially if you are using MS SQL Server as your backend data store. It's a considerably higher cost impact on the business.

I know there are Express versions but how many professional developers use the Express Versions to develop enterprise applications? I'd say very very few.

Didn't realise ASP.NET was so rare. It's a piss-easy language to use to do powerful stuff.

Shouldn't any half decent programmer who knows C style languages (I'm not familiar with VB but am sure it applies here too ) be able to move over to .NET with relative ease? I've managed to integrate ASP apps and web pages with MSCRM and Sharepoint with no expereince in it what so ever (for our office - not commercial work). It all seemed straight forward to me. I know when I was looking for work every second ad was asking for .NET experience. I was straight out of uni and had never touched it so didn't even know what it involved let alone have experience in it. Maybe if you are struggling to find a decent person then look for a decent programmer first and let them learn .NET? :o

When i started here i had been programming for 10-15 years (5 or so in work environment) and had done ASP and VB6 (as well as PHP/Perl/other misc languages). But i had never done any .NET.

If you are experienced in programming, regarless of language, you should be able to learn .NET in a week (if you play each night for a few hours).

It is rather easy to get the hang of and huge amounts of help out there.

Anyways, just so you know, THE JOB HAS BEEN OFFERED TO SOMEONE. Not sure if they have accepted but i think they have from what boss was saying.

But Q2 Solutions is growing very very fast (over doubled number of emps in last 2 years) so if you are looking for a good company that is going places, just keep sending in resumes to Zane and he can keep them on file for when we need another developer (probably not far off the rate we are going).

No gonna reply in detail to yur idividual points SFB, but those products you mention are NOT requisite to develop in .Net. If you NEED them then you have a commercial requirement beyond "make somethng in ASP.Net".

Developing under the .Net framework doesn't require s*** like Visio. You can use any UML product you want. The same goes for MS Project and pretty much everything you listed.

If you need a production server environment then you can license a fully-functional Server 2003 VPS for as little (or cheaper by now probably) than 70 bucks a month inc GST. If you want to keep it all legal & in house then you can get an MSDN subscription that includes Visual Studio Professional and a dev license to EVERY MS OS for a few k.

Microsoft do a LOT of s*** wrong but they do look after developers very, very well. They need to - half their OS hegemony (and a huge chunk of their bottom line) depends on lots and lots of software being developed for Windows.

last edited by Hogfather at 13:49:35 07/May/08

i agree with everything hogfather says.

I don't know if people realise but small development companies don't use MS tools as they are expensive to license and maintain whereas in Enterprise computing the majority is MS based and PHP is rare to find. In a nutshell large orgainsations use MS where as small organisations tend to use Open Source.

I work for a large financial services company and the overwhelming majority of sizeable apps are all done in Java with open source frameworks and libraries. MS tech is generally limited to VBA stuff and the odd simple .NET app.

visual studio express editions are pretty cool. however, if you want to muck around with web development it seems you are forced to use VB.NET. would be nice to have the choice.

a large financial services company and the overwhelming majority of sizeable apps are all done in Java with open source frameworks

finance says it all, bunch of tight asses.

I didn't say every financial institution - that would be a silly blanket statement.. I'm betting you guys use Oracle though, which would explain the open source dev tools bit, no f***en money left in the budget :p

Also:



MS love developers, see?!

last edited by Hogfather at 08:05:24 08/May/08

hast, when you create a new web project in Visual Studio you choose the default language:

http://mongie.com/ulimages/klz1210198539f.jpg

For some reason it defaults to VB n the express version of VS Web. But that's your problem. MS have stated that they equally support VB.Net and C# as the primary languages over the CLR.

last edited by Hogfather at 08:15:49 08/May/08

Well, in a turn of events, the person offered the job apparently forgot he was going on holiday for 2 months (as you do) so the job is still up for grabs.

So anyone who was considering it, send in resumes by all means.

haha wtf you might have gotten out of that easy by the sound of it!

stall for another few months!

so.. who, on this forum, is going on holiday for two months?

*looks around*

I develop applications in C# using the .NET framework, and by far the biggest expense we have (or so I am told) is the MS SQL server licenses. Our DB guys state that since we have web boxes (in this case ASP.NET applications) connecting to these MS SQL servers, that they must purchase per CPU licenses which is a considerable expense. But I take that information with a grain of salt because our DB guys are in another state and are not what I would call MS SQL experts.

Our DB guys state that since we have web boxes (in this case ASP.NET applications) connecting to these MS SQL servers, that they must purchase per CPU licenses which is a considerable expense.

That's accurate information. As soon as you deployed MS SQL server in the web application environment, it's an instant per CPU license for SQL Server for you. Unless you're doing Intranet stuff via SBS Enterprise edition which you can accounts for the number of unique connections - which really won't be web apps but more Windows apps that needs SQL backend.

You can use other OSS RDBM like PostreSQL which has just as much features if not more than MS SQL, it just doesn't make the manager all warm and fuzzy inside because it's OSS. Hell even MySQL could replace most Web apps that replies on MS SQL as a back end DB for SMB's if you really wanted to save $$$.

Our DB guys state that since we have web boxes (in this case ASP.NET applications) connecting to these MS SQL servers, that they must purchase per CPU licenses which is a considerable expense.

This may be a nub question but what are you doing that requires a licensed (non-free) version of SQL Server? This thread has a good discussion about Express vs Standard Edition for internet-facing apps.

Standard or workgroup will potentially perform better because of their lack of memory restrictions as well as 64bit support. Aside from that, the other difference in the various SQL 2K5 editions is pricing and licensing. With SQL Express you do not have to worry about db licensing and the product is free even for internet facing apps. With standard edition (or any other non-free SQL2K5 edition) you do need to worry about it. Since you are talking about an internet facing application, you would need to purchase processor licensing if you chose to use any edition other than SQL Express - which can be quite expensive.

here is the page that details the different licensing scenarios you may need to consider http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/default.mspx

here is the link to the SQL 2005 (including sql express) product feature comparison matrix http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/features/compare-features.mspx

My understanding has always been that until database size or program memory space becomes an issue that the free Express version will work fine. Most small to medium solutions would fall into this category?

Moving your DB layer to another platform will add some complexity as ASP.Net undeniably works best against MS SQL (but I have personally worked with a solution that hooked into Oracle).

last edited by Hogfather at 03:57:37 10/May/08

lol @ the fat microsoft steve balmer guy :D

and hows the take up on ms sql really? is it taking any market share from oracle at all?

that was a cracker hogfather :D theres even more of them

My understanding has always been that until database size or program memory space becomes an issue that the free Express version will work fine. Most small to medium solutions would fall into this category?

Also max concurrent connections will also be a factor. Intranet sites for SMB's will probably won't have to worry about that. Also management of the SQL Server will be slightly more difficult because of lack of SQL Enterprise Manager but yeah you're right though most SMBs should be fine. That or just use OSS RDBMs.

Also max concurrent connections will also be a factor. Also management of the SQL Server will be slightly more difficult because of lack of SQL Enterprise Manager.

You're a year or two out of touch mate ;) There's an Express version of the Management Studio product and I'm pretty sure the concurrency & performance throttles were removed in the 2005 versions of MSDE (what became referred to as Express).

The development of all this Express stuff is no doubt due to a desire for MS to properly break into the bottom end of the market - part of a greater plan to get MS Servers and stuff ou into the genera web where PHP, mySQL and Unix are dominant.

The sale of mySQL to Sun for eleventy billion probably also raised a few eyebrows and got more of their guys seriously looking at this end of the market.


last edited by Hogfather at 09:14:47 10/May/08

every time I've installed an app that uses that express mssql version, I always see horrendous memory leaking in the mssql component.

In a nutshell large orgainsations use MS whereas small organisations tend to use Open Source.

This has been discussed before (not here).

Many small startups use open-source heavily. Medium to larger size companies go MS. Then once you get even bigger (whether by size or success) many companies start adopting open-source again as they realise it's about using the right tool for the job and being innovative, and not about using whatever tool everyone else uses. Look at IBM and Google for example.

I don't know that its necessarily a sheep thing parabol, well not for myself anyway. YMMV.

I find developing under .Net enormously productive - as a single developer the same framework grants the ability to write applications, web services, windows services, web sites, and even has a trimmed down version for mobile devices. If I want to be really evil and make DBAs scream I can even extend executable code to SQL Server with an attached assembly.

For a one man (or small) shop this allows me to cater to a range of solution space that someone specialising in PHP for the web wouldn't be able to touch. I've picked up 50k in projects in my first year purely because I am one of a very few operators in the region who can solve the problem.

As a company grows and specialisation is provided to individual roles then the freedom to develop in more niche or tightly focused technologies emerges.

every time I've installed an app that uses that express mssql version, I always see horrendous memory leaking in the mssql component.

I had a similar problem with my VPS where memory is very very tight (only 256M and no virtual to speak of). Turns out that the default install for SQL Express uses a very aggressive maximum memory footprint that it will grow into over time. This can - and should - be trimmed to suit the use case:

http://mongie.com/ulimages/bwy1210383505i.jpg

last edited by Hogfather at 11:41:58 10/May/08

I don't know that S s a sheep thing parabol, well not for myself anyway.

No idea what you just said in that sentence, but "YMMV" I can agree with.

Sorry I have less than 100% responsive fingers these days, takes a few edits to get a post right ;) How about a preview feature troggles! Anyway its right now, and yeh the YMMV was there just for you.

Orryeh, that's another thing. Intellisense is the f***ing bomb if you can't ype for s*** and your language of choice is strongly-typed!

last edited by Hogfather at 11:57:20 10/May/08

concurrency & performance throttles were removed in the 2005 versions of MSDE

I stand corrected. It's also cool that you can get Management interface for express 2005 MSSQL as well. Pity the put a hard limit on the DB size to 4GB but then if you need more than that you should probably looking for an alternative.

Eaxactly - once you get the sort of requirements where the db size gets over 4GB and / or 1GB RAM & 1 CPU is a limiting factor on performance you are doing some pretty serious work and a review of the DB layer is almost a given anyway.

Basically the company I work for already has a large number of MS SQL servers for a variety of systems, from external facing websites and applications to retail store software through to internal business applications.

A hint as to what company, our main site and backup site (load balanced between the two) each chew up 100 megabit connections for bandwidth alone on melbourne cup day. I can't recall the transaction processing requirements but its a pretty amazing figure.

I have heard some people talk about a new licensing method that microsoft will be introducing to solve the problem where people have to buy expensive per CPU licenses for an external facing web site. I can't remember the details off the top of my head.

last edited by Thundercracker at 13:40:50 10/May/08

Through my work I've found M$ licensing to be very flexible and versatile for big business and government. It seems to me that the licensing gets better as the scale increases.