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by ThirdFoundation 2723 days ago
I was wondering if you could give me a little advice as to what I should focus on to more specialize in the Microsoft stack?

I'm on a bit of an unusual track into software engineering, having started in finance and first teaching myself to code via VBA and SQL. That coding led to me getting a second degree in computer science, which I'll be finishing this year (and I now know way too much about VBA).

All that of that preamble to say that I've had a ton of experience with SQL Server, VBA, Excel in my old life. I think I could be a pretty good candidate to fully immerse myself in the .NET stack. However, my school doesn't touch much on the .NET technologies, focusing more on JavaScript, Python, and C++.

Would it make sense to focus on C# and move on from there? Or there other things I should know well? Do you use much PowerShell? Javascript?

Thanks! Sorry if this was a bit long.

1 comments

I'd be familiar with c# but it's an easy language, and there are tons of devs with c# experience.

But I'd mainly focus on JavaScript/TypeScript. And if you're about to graduate then focus really heavily on react or angular. Microsoft shops are drowning in .net talent/experience but are starving for good front end devs with deep angular or react experience.

And I wouldn't bother with powershell at all, unless you have wanted to move away from development and towards infrastructure.

I can attest to this. Having worked in an finance shop myself, there were numerous .NET engineers there but none of which had relevant experience with Angular/React + Typescript.
This is really helpful, thank you. I've been diving into heavy doses of JavaScript lately -- I'll continue with that and augment it with TypeScript and React too.
This makes sense. MS office is moving to the “cloud” and extensions are now programmed in JavaScript or TypeScript (also a Microsoft project).