I’m sure that, for the vast majority of the readers of my blog, becoming more productive with your programming tools is a desirable goal. Not all developers go out of their way to advance their skills, but the very fact that you read blogs means that getting better is of interest to you. And, for most companies, they would also like you to make better use of your existing tools. It’s certainly obvious that it’s in your company’s best interest for this to happen, even if they don’t go out of their way to explicitly advance your skills.
And this is the ugly truth for most companies. In the best of times, a large number of companies don’t provide any significant budget for formal training. Usually developers are expected to pick up any new skills on their own time. Or, worse, they are expected to apply new technologies without spending any ‘exploratory’ time with them. As most of your are aware, the first time you try a new technology, the result is usually only partially successful. Only after you have worked with it a few times does it become possible to take full advantage of it. And yet, management is reluctant to pay for training classes, tech conferences, or even a programming book that will help you get ‘into the zone’ for the stuff that would make a difference in your day-to-day efforts. Here's a few suggestions that might, possibly get your manager to approve educational expenses, even in the economic conditions that exist today.
Working with Books
Over the years, I have worked with a number of different companies. Each of them takes a slightly different view of what appropriate training costs are. For companies that have a large number of developers and a small educational budget, sometimes books are all that fit. For some companies, creating a library of programming books is a viable books. Your company could purchase well-reviewed (reviews are easy to find on Amazon) programming books on the relevant topics. Employees could then ‘borrow’ books that were appropriate to their current tasks. The books end up being purchased just once, but can be shared between developers as the need arises.
A more high-tech solution to the problem can be achieved with a solution to the on-line technology book site Safari. Safari allows for books to be searched electronically and even be downloaded (in a PDF format) or even printed on an as needed basis. This is a decent mix between the need to search for a specific answer and still being able to read a book cover-to-cover when called for.
However, a corporate library is not always the best solution. Finding answers in a book requires, in many cases, that you have some inkling of the solution beforehand. At a minimum, you need to frame your query appropriately, something that is as much art as science. And the pace of technology advances means that books are almost always going to lag new technology and best practices by a period of months, if not years.
Selling Management on Training: Speak Their Language
When you want to convince your boss to let you go to a conference or attend a course, the first thing to do is look at the expenditure from their perspective. After all, the cost of the training is an expense to them. If there is no corresponding benefit, it becomes difficult to justify spending the monies. And, ultimately, you need to convince management that the benefits that they will gain are more than the money that they will spend.
In general, you will find that the attitude that a company has towards the training of developers is dictated by how the company makes money and who is responsible for helping to making that money. Usually, companies whose product is technology-based tend to be better at providing and paying for skill improvements for their employees. When developers productivity is closely aligned with corporate revenues, it is easier to get the boss’ attention. However, if you work on an application that has no direct correlation with how the company makes money, you’re much more likely to face an uphill battle.
But regardless of where you fit in this spectrum, focus your arguments on what they get out of sending you across town or across the country. Make the conversation about their Return on Investment. Show that the training will have concrete and immediate value to the company and you’re a lot closer to getting approval.
One way that you might be able to do this is to offer to share materials and experiences with your team upon return. At ObjectSharp, we call these sessions ‘Lunch & Learns”. You many know them as “Brown Bag Training”. By offering to present such a session after your conference or course, your company gets to spread some of the benefits of sending one person on training across multiple people. And your team benefits from having the new technologies couched in terms that are directly relevant to your environment.
In some cases, it’s also possible to get the trainer to offer to help with these sessions. This is something that ObjectSharp offers to attendees of our courses. We’re more than happy to have one of our instructors speak to your company about the newest technologies. While any course is on-going, instructors work hard to make the content relevant to you. To accomplish this, we ask about the kinds of projects that are being worked on and where the technology will be applied. So by having an ObjectSharp instructor give the Lunch & Learn, you get a person who is well-versed in the technology, but who also has a basic understanding of how it will fit into your corporate development plans.
You might consider shouldering some of the burden of training yourself. I don’t necessarily mean to pay for it directly. But if you take your time to attend user group meetings and Code Camps (both of which take place in non-work hours), you show a dedication to improving your skills that might make a difference. At a minimum, you will get some insight into the latest technologies, even if it’s not quite the same personalized and intensive hand-on experience that going on a course might be.
Finally, I’d like to leave you with one final, and surprisingly creative, argument. One of the most common questions we get from potential training clients is 'What if I train our developers and they leave?'" Our answer is invariably 'What if you don’t train them and they stay?' This usually gets an 'Aha' moment from management, followed by a realization that perhaps investing more in staff development might not be quite the pure expense that they think.
In the excitement of PDC, it slipped my mind to let everyone know that the book on which I was a co-author was actually shipped at the beginning of October. The title is the terse, yet incredibly descriptive MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-503): Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5 Windows® Communication Foundation (PRO-Certification). There is a bidding war for the movie rights and I'm hoping that George Clooney plays me in the adaptation. :)
For those of you wondering how the actual release might have slipped my mind, the reason is that I'm not involved in the steps that takes place at the end of the publishing process. Most of the book was written in the first half of the year. Since July, I have been reviewing chapters and responding to editor notes. But since the middle of August my tasks have been done. And, I'm afraid, when it comes to book writing, once I'm done, I mentally move on to the next task. So I wasn't even sure when the publication date was. But it was released and, based on the numbers that I've seen so far, it seems to be doing quite well. If any of you have the chance to read it, I'd be thrilled to hear any feedback (both good and bad).
The two or three of you who follow my blog with regularity will have noticed that I was dark for most of the summer. The reason was that I was in the process of writing a book. Co-writing, would be more accurate, but still long hours were spent pounding out prose on my antique Underwood. Okay, maybe not so much pounding, but writing a book does dry me out for writing blog posts.
The recent influx of posts would seem to indicate that the book writing process was finished. And indeed it is. In fact, my editor informed me yesterday that the files have been shipped off to the publisher for final processing and printing. This is a source of great cheer, as I can now rest easy that no additional requests for editing will arrive in my inbox.
For those of you who are interested, the book is the MS Press training kit for the Windows Communications Foundation exam. You can see what it looks like at Amazon. And feel free to buy multiple copies...they make great Christmas gifts [:)]
I have recently had the opportunity to work (once again) with Oracle. Specifically, I had to create a mechanism that would, based on configurable settings, update either a SQL Server or an Oracle database. In and of itself, this is not particularly challenging. Not since ADO.NET implemented a provider model using the Db... classes that are part of System.Data. The provider name can be used to generate the appropriate concrete instance of the DbConnection class and away you go.
While testing out this capability, I ran into this error when the target data source was Oracle. One would think (and I certainly did) was that I had missed out assigning one of the in-line parameters. The text associated with the error certainly gave that impression. And I was, after all, building the SQL statement on the fly. A bug in my logic could have placed a parameter into the SQL and not created a corresponding DbParameter.
But that was not the case.
Instead, it was that the value of one of my parameters (a string, as it turned out) was null. Not String.Empty, but null. And when you assign a null value to the parameter, it's as if you didn't bind anything to the parameter, the result being that when executing the query, a nice ORA-01008 exception is thrown. The correct way to do the assignment is to set the parameter value to System.DbNull value instead. It would appear that the SQL Server data provider doesn't have this issue, in that the problem only appeared against an Oracle data source. Not a particularly vexing problem, but still it's something to be aware of.
And a couple of years had passed since my last Oracle post ;)
The application on which I'm working has the opportunity to dynamically load and assembly. Later in the application, one of the types from the loaded assembly need be retrieved using GetType. More specifically, the GetType was performed using a fully qualified type name (including the name of the assembly). But the GetType failed. Naturally, this begged the question of why GetType didn't find the type in the dynamically loaded assembly.
Ultimately, it comes down to how GetType operations. If you provide a string of the form "A,C" (for assembly,class), then GetType operates as if it were performing Assembly.Load(A).GetType(C).
Notice the Load method that is in there. If A exists in the default probing path, then there is not problem. But A doesn't include a fully qualified path. And if the assembly was originally loaded from a location other then the executable's directory, GetType will fail.
There are a couple of solutions to the problem.
1 - Put the assembly in the GAC. Then Load will find the assembly and GetType will work
2 - Add a codebase element to the config file. This element can be used to control the probing path, but you cannot probe outside of the executable's directories and subdirectories. The codebase element (which has to be created for each DLL) allows you to specify the full path to the assembly.
Business has been booming of late at ObjectSharp. Don't know whether it's the weather or the business cycle, but our recent company barbeque had more new faces that I've seen in many years. And we haven't lost any of the old faces either.
And yet it doesn't seem to end. At the moment, we're looking to add some consultants to our team. Specifically, we have the need for someone with Windows Forms experience, either in creating commercial-grade user interfaces on their own or with the CAB application block.
If you (or someone you know) has that experience and is looking to join a fun team of top-notch developers, drop me your (or your friend's) resume. You'll get a chance to work on projects that use cutting edge technology. You'll learn about (and sometimes use) technologies that aren't yet available. And, if you have the interest, we have six MVPs on staff to help you get your own designation.
If you don't fit into this skill set, fret not. There will be others coming along in the very near future. Just keep your eye tuned to this blog.
As you might have guessed from the name of my blog, I have a long-term love of distributed applications. My infatuation with the technology actually goes back to earlier forms of COM+ and Web services. I believe that a well designed distributed application can be used to address the scalability, reliability and even identity issues that spring up in most large scale business applications. The biggest problem with designing distributed application is knowing which of the many available technologies is the best choice for the situation.
This is the reason that I was looking forward to the release of the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). If nothing else, WCF provided a common interface to the multiple technologies used to build distributed applications. Well, WCF has been released for a few months now (and was actually in a 'go live' state for a lot longer), which means that interest in how it can be used in real-life is growing. To help people learn and use this very cool technology, ObjectSharp is introducing a new course on the best practices surrounding WCF. The course is being developed by Peter Madziak, with more information about the content and thinking behind the course found here. If you have any interest in distributed applications in general and WCF at all, you owe it to yourself to check out the course description.
Although the publication date was slipped slightly (and there was conflicting information coming from some of the vendors), the training kit for the Distributed Applications PRO certification (70-549
) is now available. Of the three training kits I was involved in, this is the one where I thought the material would be most useful beyond studying to pass the certification test. The concepts and issues associated with distributed applications are commonplace and the book provides a nice consolidation of the latest thoughts on how to address the problems. I am curious about how people find the book, so if you have any feedback, I would love to hear it.
Those of you who actually read my blog on a regular basis might have wondered what had happened to me. While I’ve never been a ‘post-a-day’ kind of writer, it’s rare to have two months go by without a post of any substance. Well, I do have a reason for my absence.
I have spent the past months working on three separate writing projects, specifically the training kits for the Web, Windows and Enterprise Pro exams that are part of the MCPD certification. The names are too long to include, but they are MCPD Self-Paced Training Kits for exams 70-547 (Web), 70-548 (Windows), and 70-549 (Enterprise). None of these books are available yet (Amazon has them being released on Feb 28th), but I put the final stamp of approval on my part a short time ago.
This isn’t the first book I’ve been involved in. The other one was called The ASP 3.0 Code Maintenance Handbook from Wrox. The Friday before it was release, Wrox went bankrupt, so you can imagine that it didn’t sell incredibly well. In one of life’s little ironies, all three of these unreleased books are already selling better than my first ever did. And I can’t imagine that I’m a bad enough writer to drive Microsoft press out of business.
Anyway, once the holiday season has passed, I fully expect to be increasing my blog post output. So look for topics of interest for people who are working with ASP.NET 2.0, as well as anything else that might catch my interest.