Jeff Nadeau - Beyond Lektora & Microsoft

I left my job at SSQ Groupe Financier, an important insurance company in Quebec to join Facilité Informatique, an IT consulting firm. For the next year, I’ll be working exclusively with C#/ASP.NET at Société Immobilière du Québec, a government organism that manages a lot of buildings around the province.

So, that means no more Java/J2EE and Adobe Flex for me for a while. In fact, .NET skills are in crazy high demand here in Quebec City while Java is unfortunately slowing dying… Microsoft really did a great job promoting their technologies!

Personally, I think C# has became a really great language over Java. LINQ is simply amazing, one of the greatest innovation from MS for a while. Also, small things like object and collection initializers are really useful, especially for unit testing.

Unfortunately, we’re using ASP.NET WebForms. I would I have loved to try ASP.NET MVC because so far, I think it’s really promising. As for data access, we opted for NHibernate, which is nice for me, because I’ve got a lot of experience with Hibernate in Java. However, Entity Framework 4.0 seems promising at this point. I’m looking forward to the evolution of those technologies.

Finally, I’ve begun testing BDD with a port of Ruby’s Cucumber to .NET called SpecFlow. I’m totally amazed at the possibilities of those tools. If implemented well, it could really close the gap between the domain experts and the developers while developing the system.