The Web Developer Career

rrobbins — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 13:48:00 GMT

I don't see the independent web developer's viewpoint expressed in the ASP.NET community. Most of the blog posts concern highly technical aspects of architecture, testing, advanced language features, etc. I would guess that the community is primarily made of up Microsoft employees involved in advancing the ASP.NET platform, technology writers specializing in ASP.NET, and consultants like MVPs. This makes http://weblogs.asp.net a good place to keep up with the state of the technology but every community can benefit from a variety of viewpoints.

I used to work for a very small company as a web developer and then I was let go and had to work for myself. Currently I am working full-time for a non-profit and should be concerning myself more with Windows Application development for the desktop. However, there is a surprisingly high demand for web developers and I've seen that you can easily remain employed as long as you keep up your web development skills. Going into business for yourself as a web developer is definitely practical due to the large number of Internet entrepreneurs out there. I didn't like being swamped with projects when I worked for that small company but I soon found myself swamped with work when I was working for myself because there is just too much work to be had. You don't even need to advertise or promote yourself. The cost of client acquisition is zero making it a sweet business to start. You get to work with a lot of entrepreneurs and act as an entrepreneur yourself making it somewhat exciting.

Nevertheless, there are some important considerations to take into account if you want to remain marketable as a web developer. First there is what technology and skills to invest in. I would argue that the platform is less important than the choice of business application. You can pick ASP.NET, LAMP, or Java but you should stick to one framework because it is too time consuming to master more than one. But after you've invested in a language and a framework you still need to make a wise decision in picking an application. Half of my work was customizing e-commerce shopping carts and half was taking up an abandoned custom web application. I think e-commerce shopping carts are a safe bet because you build expertise in a web application that is used by many companies.

Currently I am still doing a lot of work customizing LaGarde's Storefront shopping cart which was built for ASP.NET 1.1. So I still do most of my work in Visual Studio 2003. I've built up a lot of expertise in that specific application which is a mess of VB classes in five projects. However, I now regret my investment in Storefront because LaGarde has abandoned their developer community and only services their enterprise clients. On the other hand this has left many small businesses in the lurch. They have also invested heavily in Storefront to run their online stores and now they must rely on a dwindling supply of developers to maintain it. I probably don't have a lot of competition anymore.

I should consider my options for a new web application to develop expertise in. There are many choices available to a web developer familiar with the ASP.NET platform. DotNetNuke seems to be a very popular web application framework with a good developer community. I know of a lot of independent ASP.NET developers involved in the DotNetNuke marketplace. I get the impression that there are many incomplete DotNetNuke deployments out there. It is easy to install DotNetNuke and appear to be making a lot of progress because you have the application infrastructure established. But then there is the difficult task of customizing the application to meet the business needs. This is where a lot of projects are abandoned leaving businesses with a need for a DotNetNuke developer.

Considering my knowledge of e-commerce I should favor another shopping cart application. There are many more shopping carts built with ASP.NET in competition with LaGarde's Storefront. I am somewhat familiar with BV Commerce which is very similar to Storefront. I see that BV Commerce 5 is now running on ASP.NET 2.0 but it costs $1500.00 for the developer version with source code. Maybe I could get the source code version by convincing a Storefront client to convert to BV Commerce?

Sharepoint is also a good web application option. I've even seen a few local jobs requiring Sharepoint expertise and Microsoft promotes it at local TechEvents. However, Sharepoint has a steep learning curve. I get the impression that you can make a lot of money as an expert Sharepoint consultant but I'm not so sure there is a demand for custom development. There does not seem to be a market for web parts. Maybe there is a lot of opportunity here because web parts are a cool technology which is being neglected.

There are other mysterious Microsoft enterprise technologies which I could specialize in but which seem to have no presence in the marketplace whatsoever. For example, Commerce Server has only a stub article on Wikipedia and I've never casually come across any articles on developing for Commerce Server. BizTalk is another server technology with a steep learning curve, a specialized market, and very little developer mind share.

I'm thinking about getting into more creative work doing web design and digital video editing but I don't think these careers offer as much steady work.

My ASP.NET Work Activities

rrobbins — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:52:00 GMT

I have not read any blog entries about how developers are using ASP.NET in their work so I thought I'd write about my current projects. I think a professional blog should be used to keep your clients and colleagues informed about your work activities, project progress, and current research or studies.

Currently I am working a project that requires me to generate a PDF based on data supplied by an online form. Unfortunately there are over 200 form fields required so progress has been very slow. With that many form fields and associated database table columns, I have written a few scripts to generate ASP.NET code. I wrote scripts to define all the variables and variable assignments for hundreds of webcontrols. I used regular expressions for that and learned more about backreferences and submatches in VBScript.

I tried to use ceTe Software's DynamicPDF Designer and DynamicPDF ReportWriter for this project but it was very tedious to design the PDF entirely through code. The DynamicPDF Designer is an interesting tool, similar to Visual Studio with its own toolbox, properties window and design view but it was unable to import an existing PDF and that forced me to completely recreate a 5 page PDF.

Fortunately, I read an article about iTextSharp, a port of the iText, a free Java-Pdf library. I was able to import an existing PDF into Adobe LifeCycle Designer and get information on all the AcroFields. Now I am writing the ASP.NET code to populate the AcroFields with data from the SQL Server database and generate a PDF form that has been filled out with the required data.

I will probably use this on another project that also requires me to generate PDFs based on templates with data pulled from a database. Currently that project is also using Word RTF templates with fields defined by brackets. My ASP.NET code reads in the Rich Text File and replaces the brackets with data from the database. Unfortunately this requires me to figure out some RTF syntax to format text and the template file is very fragile. Making a minor edit to the template will often screw up my fields.

I am also working on many projects to customize the Storefront 6.0 ecommerce shopping cart from LaGarde. This shopping cart was developed in ASP.NET 1.1 and has never been upgraded for ASP.NET 2.0. That is the biggest reason for me being so unfamiliar with ASP.NET 2.0. Storefront 6.0 has had 8 service packs but now its development has been abandoned so there is a high demand for fixes, customizations, and maintenance by ecommerce sites that are deperate for support. Storefront 6.0 requires 5 projects in a solution and there are a huge number of classes. Fortunately I have found a way to make my work easier using the log4net logging service. Log4net allows me to "instrument the code" so I can figure out if a method is being called and if its variables have the expected value. This would all be a lot easier if I could use Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0.

This week I fixed a problem with the Freightquote component of Storefront 6.0. They made a slight change to the syntax of the XML request you make to their web service for obtaining shipping quotes. Apparently the developer of Storefront 6.0 is not going to bother to fix this. I will also be troubleshooting a problem with the changes USPS made to their web service.

Robert Robbins : Storefront 6.0

The Web Developer Career

My ASP.NET Work Activities