This week’s guest on the Ignite Your Coding live webcast needs no introduction: it’s Scott Hanselman, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, whose job is to talk about software development and how to do it right, primarily using The Empire’s tools and technologies. He’s a household name in the minds of .NET developers worldwide, and even when I was deep in the world of open source software, I’d heard of him, what with his blog, the Hanselminutes podcast, his presentations at various Microsoft conferences and (of course) his membership in the elite group known as “The Gang of Foreheads”. His influence in the Microsoft universe is like that of the Illusive Man in the Mass Effect universe.

John Bristowe and I will chat with Scott about a topic near and dear to us: the state of the .NET developer nation. It’s an exciting time to be a .NET developer: we’re a year into Windows 7, a couple of days after the release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, Windows Phone 7, Silverlight 4 and Internet Explorer 9 looming in the not-too-distant future and Microsoft making a lot of right moves. I can’t think of a better time to pick Scott’s brain and find out, straight from the source, what’s hot and what’s not in the world of .NET development. We’ll also pick his brain for tips on how to stay on top of your game as a developer in today’s ever-morphing industry.

We’ll be chatting with Scott live this Thursday at 2:00 p.m. (11:00 a.m. Pacific) online.

What’s Ignite Your Coding About?

Ignite Your Coding is a webcast series all about helping you, the software developer. We want to help you find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We contacted some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We hope it informs and inspires you!

How Do I Catch the Live Webcast?

You’ll need:

• A Windows machine
• Live Meeting (you can get a free version of Live Meeting here), which will let you see visuals, hear the audio and type in questions to ask Richard
• To register for the webcast (it’s free), click here; you’ll get the link for the webcast
• To catch the webcast on Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern / 11:00 a.m. Pacific!

How Do I Get the MP3 Recording of the Webcast?

It’ll be posted on this blog in about a week.

Who’s Coming Up on Ignite Your Coding?

• Jeff Atwood on “Horrors, Overflows and Fake Plastic Rock”
• Robert C. “Uncle Bob” Martin on software craftsmanship

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This Week’s Ignite Your Career

On this week’s edition of the Ignite Your Career webcast (it happens tomorrow, Thursday, September 24th – see below for details), we’ve got author, evangelist, developer, speaker and Principal Program Manager of Microsoft’s Developer Division Scott Hanselman to join our panel of experts to talk about making the most out of your developer or IT pro career.

This week’s panel discussion is titled Selling Yourself – Are You Using ALL Your Resources?. Here’s the abstract:

Expressing the right level of details on your personal and professional accomplishments can come in very handy when talking with your manager as well as a couple of levels up within your company. What’s your CV or Resume looking like these days? How’s your offline and online personal brand maintenance coming along? Are you doing yourself justice when someone asks you in the hallway "what have you been up to lately?" Now take this to the next level – would you be prepared if the unexpected happened and you were now out in the wild looking for a new job? We’ll be talking with industry experts who have successfully marketed themselves and helped others. We’ll also cover the other side of the coin by talking with HR professionals and recruiting experts to find out how they evaluate and choose candidates.

The line in the abstract that really gets me where I live is “Now take this to the next level – would you be prepared if the unexpected happened and you were now out in the wild looking for a new job?” Regular readers of my personal blogs, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century and Global Nerdy will know that this is exactly what happened to me a year ago tomorrow. I know from personal experience that this sort of thing does happen and it’s best to be prepared.

Along with Scott, we’ll have these folks on the panel:

Andrew Dillane, Group CIO for Randstad Canada. Andrew’s management experience in business and technology has focused on client-centered technology solutions. His leadership role in Sapphire Canada’s CONNECT™ technology solutions has resulted in the company being a two time recipient of a Canadian Information Productivity Award (CIPA). Andrew holds a BCOM from Ryerson University, is the National President for the CIO Association of Canada, serves on the Program Advisory Council for Ryerson University’s Information Technology Management (ITM) degree programs and is an expert member of the Canadian Coalition for Tomorrow’s ICT Skills. Andrew also serves on the Advisory Board for Kids Internet Safety Alliance (KINSA).

Nick Corcodilos. Nick is the host of Ask The Headhunter® and author of How to Work with Headhunters (2009). Nick is also the author of Ask The Headhunter: Reinventing The Interview to Win The Job (1997), the #1-selling interview guide on Amazon for 26 consecutive months. Nick started headhunting in 1979 in one of America’s most competitive job markets: California’s Silicon Valley. Using the methods described in his book and on the ATH blog, he has helped people win management and staff jobs in companies including IBM, GE, Hewlett-Packard and Merrill Lynch. Nick Corcodilos is president of North Bridge Group, Inc. He holds a Bachelors Degree (Phi Beta Kappa) from Rutgers College where he was a Henry Rutgers Scholar, and a Masters in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford University (where his academic bent was quickly corrupted by the Biz School and Silicon Valley).

Heather Hamilton, Global Competitive Programs Team, Microsoft. Heather manages Microsoft’s Global Competitive Programs Team responsible for competitive research and programs. In this role, she leads Microsoft’s efforts aimed at enabling global research centers to monitor the competitive talent landscape and leverage opportunities to recruit the best technical talent through deliverables such as competitive intelligence, training and opportunistic recruiting programs. Aside from managing a talented team of staffing professionals, Heather is probably best known as a blogger. She is a requested speaker on topics related to candidate outreach and community building and her blog, One Louder, has resulted in significant press interest including The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and Fast Company.

When, Where and How Do I Catch This Webcast?

The live webcast takes place tomorrow, Thursday, September 24th, from 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m. Eastern (that’s 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. Pacific). To listen to this live webcast, register here. You’ll need a Windows Live ID to register, which you can get for free.

If you have a question for the panel, you can submit it to this email address.

If you can’t catch the live webcast at its scheduled time, it will be recorded and you’ll be able to access it in the Archived Webcasts section of the Ignite Your Career site at a later date.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

When I got into web development, I considered myself a latecomer to the game, and that was in 1999. In the five years I’d been working professionally as a developer, my apps were strictly desktop – multimedia CD-ROM stuff done in Director (then a product of Macromedia) and business productivity apps written in pre-.NET VB and Java-a-la-JBuilder.

The company with whom I’d landed a contract had a contrarian tech lead. It seemed that the web app world was building their stuff on Linux, Perl and MySQL, and this guy was all about BSD, Python and PostgreSQL. In 1999 terms, he was a freak even amongst the freaks.

I had a pretty full schedule that summer, followed by a one-week vacation at Burning Man, followed by the start of my contract at this new company. The tech lead wanted me to be ready to do some coding on my first day in, so I brought a copy of O’Reilly’s Learning Python along with my laptop to Black Rock Desert, hoping to squeeze in some hacking time at the big desert bacchanal. Luckily, Burning Man is pretty mellow during the day, and in an additional stroke of luck, the neighbouring camp was sharing AC power from their “eggbeater” windmill. I learned Python by writing sample apps in an extremely distracting environment, and because of that, I fell quite in love with the language. Any language that you can learn while naked people playing the tuba on unicycles are circling you has to be a good one.

That’s why I’m glad to see that implementations like IronPython exist, and that they tie into things like the .NET framework and Silverlight. IronPython’s performance is quite close to standard Python, and I use it along with IronRuby as my scripting language for automating tasks and doing little “housekeeping” things on my systems. I’m not using IronPython to the degree that Michael Foord is – he’s using it for full-on .NET applications instead of C# or VB! Scott Hanselman talks with him about working with IronPython as his primary development language in the latest edition of his Hanselminutes podcast.

As an added bonus, the blog entry for the podcast has a special limited-time coupon code that will save you 40% off the price of Manning Publications’ IronPython in Action (which Foord co-wrote), and the discount applies to both the dead-tree and PDF versions of the book. At 40% off, the PDF version is a mere USD$16.50 (CAD$20.14 at the time of this writing).