D&DI - Lead Developer needed.

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

True, I was thinking about when it was submitted as a standard in 2000.

Arguably if they are looking for Windows development experience the big issue I would expect to see noted would be the version of .Net framework they want people to have experience with, since using C# (or whatever) against .Net 1.1, .Net 2.0 or .Net 3.0/3.5 will result in very different implementations simply because of the capabilities of the framework.

I'm guessing that they are not using .Net 3+ because of the desire for DirectX experience, but considering that .Net 3.0 apps can run on WinXP sp2 and Vista PCs, that must cover pretty much all of their target (wintel) market... and I'd bet that they could do pretty much everything within XAML and .Net 3.0 that they think they need DirectX for.

Cheers

Working .NET 3.0 at this moment, I am not convinced that WPF 3D is fast enough for an application like the Virtual Gaming Table. DirectX programming be more effective (even if WPF is actually relying on DirectX in the end, it still seems to have a very costly abstraction layer)

I love working with .NET and dread the days (that will probably come, as my current project in my company might end in the forseeable future...) where I have to programm with C++ again. But .NET 3 and WPF are still not perfect for 3D applications. (But I would take WPF over Winforms or Java swing & co every time when designing a GUI.)

 

[Aeolius]

So, is there any chance to hire someone that will scrap the whole thing and rebuild the project as a cross-platform solution?

 

[Plane Sailing]

Working .NET 3.0 at this moment, I am not convinced that WPF 3D is fast enough for an application like the Virtual Gaming Table. DirectX programming be more effective (even if WPF is actually relying on DirectX in the end, it still seems to have a very costly abstraction layer)

I love working with .NET and dread the days (that will probably come, as my current project in my company might end in the forseeable future...) where I have to programm with C++ again. But .NET 3 and WPF are still not perfect for 3D applications. (But I would take WPF over Winforms or Java swing & co every time when designing a GUI.)

My thinking was that the demos of the DI which have been shown were very simple movements of static 3d models with the occasional rotation and lighting effects added (rather than complex realtime gaming-style UI)

But I'll certainly defer to your practical experience with .Net 3.0. I've done some playing with WPF but my core work at the moment is all .Net 2.0

Cheers

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

My thinking was that the demos of the DI which have been shown were very simple movements of static 3d models with the occasional rotation and lighting effects added (rather than complex realtime gaming-style UI)

But I'll certainly defer to your practical experience with .Net 3.0. I've done some playing with WPF but my core work at the moment is all .Net 2.0

Cheers

I know, but even that can get slow! (Maybe we're doing it wrong )

 

[kenmarable]

My guess would be that Radiant Initiative will deliver the initial application and during the beta phase do a technology transfer to WOTC, where the WOTC in house team spins up, gets familiar with the application and when the DDI goes live the WOTC team takes over completely.

I'm more inclined to believe that this is the case rather than the "sky is falling!!" assumption that it'll crash and burn (though WotC does make it awfully easy to go Chicken Little some days). But given how these sorts of transfers happen quite often in the IT realm, that is probably all that it is.

 

[kenmarable]

Maybe you would, but a bunch of the programmers I know...

Wouldn't that be an incentive...?

Whoops!! Wow, what a typo. I should go back and edit it, but it's pretty funny. And I suppose the same F word can apply to both situations.

Oh, and if you are thinking about the job, but are unsure of WotC, Paizo is also looking for a programmer. It asks for Java and WebObjects experience, but they've stated that in one of the messageboard threads that between enough of the code being custom and the fact that if you know one or two languages pretty well you can pick up another, they are flexible on the Java experience.

 

[Mercule]

My thinking was that the demos of the DI which have been shown were very simple movements of static 3d models with the occasional rotation and lighting effects added (rather than complex realtime gaming-style UI)

But I'll certainly defer to your practical experience with .Net 3.0. I've done some playing with WPF but my core work at the moment is all .Net 2.0

I do mainly ASP.NET (with some WF), so I'm not likely to have hands-on with WPF anytime in the near future. The bits I've read about it indicate that it takes some horsepower to make it work well, though.

Silverlight is supposed to be considerably more lightweight, web-based, and cross platform, though. That might be a fair middle-ground. Of course, I'm also strongly opposed to web-based applications that don't have to be web-based: word processors, spreadsheets, chargens, etc.

 

[drothgery]

Yet JavaScript in general is pretty trivial to pick up. I didn't even know I was writing JavaScript code for some time when I first had a go at it.

... as long as you're writing straight procedural code, that's pretty much true. The kind of stuff that makes AJAX apps work... well, I'm just glad MS has some nice libraries and server controls to take care of it. Objects in dynamicly typed languages are odd.

Perl you may have a point with, but it's a scripting language, and seemingly purposefully black-magic-obscure and punctuation crazy. Weird punctuation languages like that and LISP are the exception, not the rule. C# has no such excuse - heck, they even let you write in whatever you choose in Visual Studio in general, nowadays. They're that similar....except to HR staff who like buzzwords, seemingly.

Which was pretty much my point. There's a subset of OO languages that are fairly similar, and pretty widely used as OO languages, especially by line-of-business developers (i.e. guys who program for companies who aren't in the business of selling software or building web sites -- which includes me). They're all staticly typed (or close to staticly typed), and follow certain patterns for object definitions. Most of them look a lot like C at the procedure level. And flipping between those is pretty trivial. So I agree that specific language expertise -- especially on .NET -- is kind of silly to ask for in a job posting (though you would want .NET platform expertise).

But there are a lot of languages out there that don't pay much attention to the conventions that Simula set up, C++ popularized, and C#, Java, and VB.NET have made the mainstream way to program these days.

 

[Silent Cartographer]

If you think that job posting is insultingly amatuer and imprecise, trust me, it's completely typical; I've seen far worse listings than this. WotC's in plenty of good company in regards to HR technical mangle-speak.

Parsing employment listings like this makes me glad (for the moment) that I've converted to perm and gotten off the contracting rollercoaster for a while...

 

[Creeping Death]

So, is there any chance to hire someone that will scrap the whole thing and rebuild the project as a cross-platform solution?

Too bad they didn't use Java. Oh well. I would have seriously considered applying if that's the language they were using.