C#, MVC3, WCF jobs market.

[insur]

My contract is finally coming to an end, been at the same place for over 2.5 years.

Thinking about going permi for a while and I was wondering if anyone has recently tried for a permi in
C#, MVC3, WCF, nHibernate, RhinoMocks etc, etc.. in the SE.

I've taken a look at the usual sites but I was wondering if anyone has any real recent knowledge of what the market is actually like in this area.

[SimonMac]

I assume you are insurance based, but funny you should mention those skills as the project I am working on is gearing up to increase resources in the Crawley area if you can throw in a little BizTalk as well?

Nothing concrete but if I hear anything more I will let you know

[Gentile]

My contract is finally coming to an end, been at the same place for over 2.5 years.

Thinking about going permi for a while and I was wondering if anyone has recently tried for a permi in
C#, MVC3, WCF, nHibernate, RhinoMocks etc, etc.. in the SE.

I've taken a look at the usual sites but I was wondering if anyone has any real recent knowledge of what the market is actually like in this area.

Welcome to the forum.

I work in these technical areas, though in Scotland and not in the South East.

ASP.Net MVC appears to be flavour of the month with some financial organisations right now, but not with anyone else really. There still seem to be more ASP.Net jobs. I'd say for every MVC role I see, there are about five ASP.Net ones.

nHibernate's still got a following, though Entity Framework is starting to make some headway now, as the people who went through the pain of learning nHibernate begin to realise that there's an easier way to perform the same task.

There are other roles out there that involve more niche knowledge of how to optimise data transfer in ways that no ORM is good at. Generally, these are for websites that have the problem of narrow windows within which a high volume of transactions must be supported. E.g., Ticketmaster, William Hill, etc., experience these issues when there's a popular event on such as a big concert or the Grand National. Some experience with load balancing is useful for those types of problem.

Some organisations instead experience the related but distinct problem of trying to process a high volume of data contained within a small number of transactions. There are ways around that too, typically involving making use of XML and stored procedures.

So, bottom line, the skillset you mention is attractive (to both permie and contract recruiters, from what I can tell). Though there will always be something to stretch you a little wherever you may go.

[insur]

I assume you are insurance based, but funny you should mention those skills as the project I am working on is gearing up to increase resources in the Crawley area if you can throw in a little BizTalk as well?

Nothing concrete but if I hear anything more I will let you know

Thanks for the reply. I'm currently finance based but switching between sectors has never proven to be a significant problem. I don't have BizTalk I'm afraid, it's been considered as an option but always been dismissed as too heavy weight for the integration requirements.

Thanks for the offer.

[insur]

Welcome to the forum.

I work in these technical areas, though in Scotland and not in the South East.

ASP.Net MVC appears to be flavour of the month with some financial organisations right now, but not with anyone else really. There still seem to be more ASP.Net jobs. I'd say for every MVC role I see, there are about five ASP.Net ones.

nHibernate's still got a following, though Entity Framework is starting to make some headway now, as the people who went through the pain of learning nHibernate begin to realise that there's an easier way to perform the same task.

There are other roles out there that involve more niche knowledge of how to optimise data transfer in ways that no ORM is good at. Generally, these are for websites that have the problem of narrow windows within which a high volume of transactions must be supported. E.g., Ticketmaster, William Hill, etc., experience these issues when there's a popular event on such as a big concert or the Grand National. Some experience with load balancing is useful for those types of problem.

Some organisations instead experience the related but distinct problem of trying to process a high volume of data contained within a small number of transactions. There are ways around that too, typically involving making use of XML and stored procedures.

So, bottom line, the skillset you mention is attractive (to both permie and contract recruiters, from what I can tell). Though there will always be something to stretch you a little wherever you may go.

Thanks for the reply - nice to know I'm on the right tracks.

Having done both ASP.net and MVC I certainly prefer MVC as it offers so much more control and a cleaner separation of concerns. I have just completed my last project in MVC and I would not be at all keen to go back to traditional ASP.net.

ClientCo is very strict on adhering to OO principles and felt MVC satisfied this more than traditional ASP.net.

Cheers.