My .NET career growth plan

Visit www.RoadAheadSolutions.com a site to help you build .NET Career. Cool Stuff

 

Microsoft Certification is indeed nice to learn new things and are useful if you don't use braindumps.
I did interviews where the candidate had 96% on application foundation cert. But he didn't know what WebConfigurationManager and DeflateStream was.
The best training is experience in projects. Try to work with people with more/better knowledge.

But what is in depth CLR and SQL server questions? Do you have an example?
Was it how SQL server is building the index tables, using indexes, performance tuning with all the parameters available.

I agree with Christian! Being Microsoft Gold certified partners, developers at Talentica have benefited to quite an extent by obtaining Microsoft Certification. To know more, visit http://www.talentica.com or write to me at info@talentica.com. 

Christian has some great suggestions. Those are excellent ways of continuing your education and improving your skills and knowledge. Certifications will help immensely. I personally take a different approach. I don’t have any certifications; I rely solely on my experience. However, everyone has to start somewhere, and if you have no experience, then you need to get some. Practical experience will yield more knowledge than any book ever can. However that’s not to say books are not effect learning tools, because they very much are and I use them often. The wealth of knowledge available on the internet today should provide you with a solution to almost any development related problem.

A good way to start would be to download several of the latest open source .Net projects, some of which can be found on the ASP.NET Web site if you’re planning to focus on Web application dev. Dig through the code and examine the methodologies used. Create a database diagram of the SQL data models in those projects to help understand the relationships between the tables. The DotNetNuke for example was instrumental in paving the way for new ASP.NET features and concepts. Microsoft applied some of the practices utilized in that open source project to the 2.0 release of ASP.NET. It was those DotNetNuke developers who paved the way for new ASP.NET features and if you understood the app well, you were already on the same page when 2.0 was released.

Acquire a .Net hosting account from a provider and setup a Web space that you can practice with. Hosting is super cheap these days. Software development is a trade skill similar to welding or music. It requires you to hone your skills by practicing your craft. The more you practice, the more confidence you will gain and the stronger your skill set will become. Setup sandbox projects that allow you experiment with patterns and practices to understand concepts. Learning from existing projects will give you insight into what works and you may find yourself realizing that you can build a better mouse trap in the process.

If you can’t land a job yet, then take on smaller side projects from some of the work for hire Web sites out there that you can use for your portfolio. Most employers just want to know that you can do the job, and if you have no previous work experience under your belt, it’s going to be hard to convince them that you can in fact do the work.
Good luck friend.

I already answered but my session was gone when I tried to save my post. So here's a summary:

• Look at the different Microsoft Certifications you can do regarding Software Development, for example:
070-536 (.NET 2.0 Basics) 070-505 (.NET 3.5, WinForm) 070-563 (.NET 3.5 Pro)
• Make use of the Microsoft Learning Center
• Download and work through the Microsoft Training Kits (.NET 3.5, 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, Windows Phone 7, etc. pp.)
• Register for and experiment with the MSDN Virtual Labs

Thats a fast summary of typical learning resources available for free from Microsoft that should help you to get into the right direction and deepen your Know How.

Regards,
- Chris.