WPF as a viable career focus?

[MacContractor]

All my friend are doing is pure UI work, nothing else. All the data is sent to them via a set of services. They can't believe how much they're getting paid for what they have to do. Fire your CV in and see what happens, they can only say no!

[MyUserName]

That would be fantastic however with only 18 months dev experience I think that's a little above my ability at this point.

Rubbish, give it a shot. Read up on interview questions and dive in there.

[Hardgrafter]

So is the general consensus to take a few years to get to 'Senior developer' standard (whatever that means) before looking to contracting or to just try & dive in at the deep end without the experience?

I know the basics of C#, OOP, Xaml, databinding etc but I'm in no way a guru and I wouldn't expect to be after just 18 months. My plan was to spend 4 years or so getting to the required level, although I don't know what that level is...

Also I don't have the academic comp science background so it really is 18 months from nothing to where I am now.

I was a contractor in a previous life and industry so have no reservations re the lifestyle, running a ltd co etc.

[jmo21]

If you're looking to get into banking there's a fair few bank jobs up in Glasgow at the moment paying between £400 - £500 and I know for a fact that's they can't get enough WPF dev's. Could be your way in if you fancy working for a bank.

He'll need to brush up on threading for those as well.

[MacContractor]

Good call regarding threading.

[Hardgrafter]

Yeah I only know the basics of threading. Not up on C# new Await/Async stuff either yet.

My concern would be if I somehow landed a gig & on the first day they expected me to hit the ground running with say Prism or MVVM Light toolkit, Multi-threading, TDD and complex validation logic.
I think I would be exposed quite quickly.

I'd rather take my time upskilling & go to contracting knowing that I'm suitably qualified rather than putting myself into a 'sink or swim' situation where I'm frantically searching Stack Overflow every 30 seconds when colleagues aren't looking and trying to read up to speed until the early hours every night in an attempt to avoid getting canned...

[denBen]

Yeah I only know the basics of threading. Not up on C# new Await/Async stuff either yet.

My concern would be if I somehow landed a gig & on the first day they expected me to hit the ground running with say Prism or MVVM Light toolkit, Multi-threading, TDD and complex validation logic.
I think I would be exposed quite quickly.

I'd rather take my time upskilling & go to contracting knowing that I'm suitably qualified rather than putting myself into a 'sink or swim' situation where I'm frantically searching Stack Overflow every 30 seconds when colleagues aren't looking and trying to read up to speed until the early hours every night in an attempt to avoid getting canned...

Did you see my request for a PM?

Anyway, regarding your fear of 'being exposed'. Nobody knows everything, nobody at all. Someone with 10 years experience will most likely only have a few years experience working with their current technology as it changes fairly quickly. You will be expected to hit the ground running as a contractor, but I would be surprised if a company expected anyone to have an expert level of knowledge of every component.

Also, re: stackoverflow. There's no shame in doing that, and it's commonplace.