It really depends on whether you can prove that your VB.NET skills work well in a test-driven and agile environment. If I were starting out with a new codebase, I’d honestly have to say no, I would not want a VB.NET consultant. I don’t really like the fact that VB.NET is harder to fit into an MVC pattern but it IS possible. Also, most of the newer and interesting libraries are written in PHP, Ruby and Python (in pretty much that order). That said, I’m not averse to hiring a VB.NET consultant in the context of an existing VB.NET codebase.

The only problem I foresee is whether or not there are a lot of VB.NET programmers with the same mindset. A cursory set of Google searches tell me that NUnit is available for .NET programmers so that’s probably a start. I haven’t been doing anything close to VB much less VB.NET for years so I’m completely out of touch with that community. It was a great technology for 1998 but I do think it’s been surpassed by open-source languages and their frameworks in the past few years.

BTW, this is comment #666 on the site! Mark of the beast, baby!!!

I think it’s an interesting issue that in our industry source control and patterns are almost de rigeur at this point. No matter what methodology you use I would assume that those issues are already incorporated within most people’s toolsets but you’re right, they deserve mentioning.

As for languages… I’m officially language-agnostic. However, I find that certain languages haven’t had MVC frameworks until fairly recently so that’s why I tend to really dislike them. PHP has gotten theirs but I find Rails (and Ruby) a lot more intuitive. What’s funny is that I used to implement a crude version of MVC in “classic” ASP vbscript and after seeing MVC implemented in Rails, I was utterly sold.

My professional software development history is only half as long as yours Michael, but I’ve seen similar shifts myself. My particular history as a kid in high school coding Basic, Pascal, to c, to Perl, to ASP vbscript, to .NET C#, and now to Ruby has definitely taught me that programmers need to be able to retool every few years. So am I sold on Rails right now? Yes. Will I leave it if something better comes along? You betcha! There’s stuff coming down the road now that I find interesting like multi-paradigm programming languages (Oz) but for at least the next few years, I can guarantee that the languages that implement MVC best will become more and more dominant in Web programming and right now, that’s probably Rails, Python and PHP in that order.

Because I think about this stuff so much, I thought I’d just throw in two points that you don’t mention, and a couple quibbles as well…

Missing point(1) atterns. I think any development project manager should be conversant with the language around software design patterns and understand patterns like wrappers and adapters.

Missing point (2) : you don’t mention making sure the person uses a Version Control System of some sort. CVS, SubVersion, whatever. And the developer should have a clear philosphy around when code is committed, when it is branched, and so on. Working without version control is performing without a net.

Now my quibble. I’ve become very cautious around elevating any language or toolset to a Holy Grail position after watching the development community do this over and over again during the last 20 years. All your problems will be solved if you just port to C, C++, Visual Basic, Java, PHP, Ruby… I put very little emphasis on language – in fact when we hire, we do not require that the programmer have prior experience at all with the particular tools we are planning for them to use, we consider it an extra…. we are much more concerned with their general ability to program.

As for the list, yes I would be able to hire myself but again, if you had read closely, I’m looking for people to substitute for me. I know it’s a blog post but take some time to read. We’re all friends here, aren’t we? I’m sure you can always troll on Digg.