InnerWorkings announced a major addition to its Learning Platform today with the release of self-paced SharePoint 2010 training for professional developers and software teams.

Working in partnership with the USPJ Academy, InnerWorkings is offering world class SharePoint learning solutions to its customers. USPJA boasts a team of industry renowned SharePoint experts whose approach emphasizes the real-world aspects of learning SharePoint — a perfect fit with the InnerWorkings methodology.

InnerWorkings confirmed the immediate release of three SharePoint courses to its Learning Platform, covering the following topics:

• Beginning SharePoint Development
• SharePoint Data View Web Part Basics
• SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflow

Additional SharePoint courses are in development and will be released on a quarterly basis. All of the SharePoint courses include video-based instruction from USPJA experts, hand-picked e-books, and a virtual lab environment to practice important configuration tasks. In addition, a Live Guide feature connects developers and in-house SharePoint experts to facilitate ongoing support and grading of assignments.

“With over 100M users and $1B in revenue for Microsoft, SharePoint is the understated giant of Microsoft’s enterprise collaboration strategy”, said Francis McKeagney, InnerWorkings CEO. “As a server-based technology, SharePoint presents significant challenges to organizations wishing to provide deep, hands-on training to their software teams. We are really excited that our new offering addresses this issue in a rigorous and compelling way. The virtual lab capability, in particular, allows for deep learning in both generic and customizable setups. We are delighted to partner with USPJA to deliver such a comprehensive enterprise learning solution for SharePoint development teams. USPJA’s knowledge and expertise has made this offering possible.”

“The market for SharePoint developers has never been hotter”, said Bjørn Furuknap, USPJA CEO. “We’ve always been extremely confident in the depth and quality of our SharePoint learning solutions, but this partnership with InnerWorkings brings tremendous scale and reach to our efforts. Coupling the technical strength of our training with the online learning expertise and global audience of InnerWorkings is a winning combination. We are delighted to partner with InnerWorkings to offer our combined SharePoint learning services to a huge audience of SharePoint developers and teams hungry to succeed in their chosen area of domain expertise.”

About InnerWorkings
At InnerWorkings, our mission is to help our customers build great software organizations. We believe that it is possible to create a successful, efficient, and cost-effective software organization and sustain it over multiple projects. How do we do this? By providing software executives with an integrated platform to improve learning, collaboration, and software processes across your development teams. The company’s R&D facility is based in Dublin, Ireland and InnerWorkings maintains its corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California. For more information about InnerWorkings and its services, visit www.innerworkings.com.

Do you obsess about metrics like bugs counts, lines of code, code coverage, and cyclomatic complexity? Well, this article by Andrew Binstock may give you some heart. Andrew makes the point that most code metrics used today are deeply flawed and broadly misused.

His article titled The Dismal Science of Code Metrics lays out an argument that metrics are only useful if you’re really clear about what numbers to measure and use consistent quantitative measurement tools as part of the process.

He also contends that many tools to measure defect counts are too closely linked to file size — as the application increases in size, so too does the associated defect count almost by default.

In the final analysis, Andrew recommends using “metrics that are straightforward, easy to understand, and that you can track easily”. That seems pretty obvious, but you’d be amazed by how many companies fail to follow this simple piece of advice when tracking code metrics.

You’ve spoken and we’ve listened. As a result, we’ve just released a comprehensive Learning Program on building HTML5 based web applications for .NET developers.

HTML5 is packed with rich features that your developers can take advantage of when building out their web apps.

Our developer training covers the following aspects of web development with HTML5:

• HTML5 elements and attributes
• graph display using JavaScript
• the canvas element
• browser history manipulation
• video and audio elements
• local and session storage
• running a Web application offline
• adapting a Web application to mobile devices

We’re excited about this new addition to our .NET training catalog.

If you’re interested in accessing our HTML5 training for your .NET team, please contact us with details of your .NET team’s learning needs. Happy coding.

Object Oriented Training Offer

We’re offering a 50% discount on our highly popular Object Oriented Techniques training. Regularly priced at $299, you’ll learn to create robust, efficient, and maintainable object-oriented applications for just $149:

• Object Oriented Techniques — C# Training ($149)
• Object Oriented Techniques — VB Training ($149)

Visit our web catalog and use the code IWOOP50 to claim your savings. Please note that this offer expires on August 31, 2011.

Are Developers Always the Last to Know?

Sebastian Holst has written an excellent article for Visual Studio Magazine titled Why Is the Developer Always the Last to Know? Successful development is measured at the point where an application and its users meet. Application analytics help to capture raw data for analysis, but your development organization must be able to turn this analysis into tangible action. This article explores how many software teams overlook user driven development by failing to map clear objectives and data requirements.

How Facebook Ships Code

There’s no shortage of articles about Facebook these days, but I suggest you read this interesting take on How Facebook Ships Code. According to the author, over 50 percent of Facebook employees reside in the Engineering or Operations groups today and the Product Manager to Engineer ratio is 1:10 or thereabouts. Can Facebook continue to maintain its “developer driven culture” as the company expands at a rapid pace? Certainly, Google has set the precedent in this regard, hanging onto its developer oriented culture over the years in the face of staggering growth and expansion.

.NET Training Catalog

With 600+ hours of developer training in our unique self-paced format, the InnerWorkings .NET training catalog is a goldmine of .NET skills. Check out some of our newest releases like .NET 4.0, Enterprise Library 5.0, and ADO.NET Entity Framework — you’re sure to find some area of .NET development that is on your list of new skills to master. Check it out.

Free Diagramming Control from Syncfusion

I’m delighted to announce that Syncfusion is offering InnerWorkings developers a hot new diagramming control called Essential Diagram for ASP.NET MVC built on HTML5. Sign up for your free license now and start creating rich, highly interactive diagrams that work on any device. Now you’ve got every reason to build stunning diagrams in your next .NET app!

Your Next Job: Mobile App Developer?

Some call it the looming ‘gold rush’ for software developers, but is there really that much interest in mobile apps these days? Beth Stackpole’s excellent article titled Your Next Job: Mobile App Developer argues that there’s a distinct lack of mobile development talent which represents a huge opportunity for developers considering a career makeover. It’s true that building for mobile apps requires a whole new skillset and mindset, but the opportunities could be enormous for developers who make the early move.

.NET 4.0 Training

Take your .NET skills to the next level with our hands-on .NET 4.0 Training. You’ll learn new coding skills in MVC, C# 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, Enterprise Library 5.0 and more. Regularly priced at $299, enjoy a 1 year subscription to deeply technical training in all these key technologies for just $199. Visit our web catalog and use the code IWVS2010 to claim your savings — offer expires on Monday, August 15th, 2011:

• .NET 4.0 Training with Visual Studio 2010

Sammamish, WA and San Francisco, CA - June 30, 2011 - ArtinSoft Corporation and InnerWorkings today announced a partnership that will result in a comprehensive offering aimed at accelerating customer migration to the Microsoft .NET platform.

InnerWorkings, a global software company that delivers a hosted.NET learning platform, allows software managers to train their programmers and evaluate skills acquisition. Their truly “hands-on” learning environment provides real experience writing code while learning new .NET technologies, all on a platform that has been tested, used, and validated by over 200,000 developers and thousands of corporations worldwide.

ArtinSoft possesses a unique automated conversion technology and years of experience in .NET migration projects for hundreds of enterprise customers around the world. Their solution helps companies move away from an unsupported platform, preserving an application’s capital investment while reducing development, maintenance and deployment costs and breaking scalability and future evolution constraints.

Focusing on software migration, InnerWorkings and ArtinSoft found perfect compatibility between their respective solutions and customer needs.

“Through this strategic partnership, both companies can now extend their offerings with substantial added value, not only migrating software applications but also updating the skill sets of the teams in charge of those systems”, noted Roberto Leiton, ArtinSoft CEO. “We are definitely excited to have InnerWorkings as a partner, foreseeing great benefits for clients looking to achieve a complete, fast and risk-free migration to .NET”.

“InnerWorkings has long searched for a meaningful .NET migration partner with a reputation for delivering rigorous, enterprise class software migrations,” said Francis McKeagney, InnerWorkings CEO. “ArtinSoft Corporation is such a partner, and we’re confident that our combined offering of best-in-breed .NET migration tools alongside world-class .NET learning will be a winning combination for our shared customer base.”

About ArtinSoft

With over fifteen years of experience, ArtinSoft has proven to be a key player in software transformation, by allowing customers from all over the world to ensure business continuity and compliance through migration solutions and developer tools. Created upon principles of artificial intelligence and a relentless passion for innovation, the company is now the de-facto leader in the VB6 application renewal space, holding an unparalleled record of real world migration projects while in constant growth through a strategic partner network. ArtinSoft’s solutions enable organizations to leverage years of intellectual and financial investment in the most cost-effective way. Furthermore, not only can its products be thoroughly customized, but also complemented with different training and technical support options. Visit www.artinsoft.com for more details.

About InnerWorkings
InnerWorkings provides a coding sandbox, integrated learning platform, and executive dashboard to improve developer skills across your software organization. Used by over 200,000 developers and many Fortune 500 companies worldwide, our learning solution is designed to help software teams of all sizes build great software on the .NET Framework. Visit www.innerworkings.com for more details.

Any number of metrics is being employed to ensure that software organizations attract the right candidates to blend in with their company culture and strategic business objectives. These metrics include everything from time to hire, interview to hire, industry diversity, people diversity, hire source, and so on.

Many companies have fine tuned their hiring process to lower costs associated with recruitment and align hiring expenses with business priorities.

Despite the many sophisticated models employed to hire the right people, demands for talented employees exceeds the supply. This leaves many organizations wondering what strategies to adopt to ensure that they can retain and even expand their workforces to maintain competitive advantage.

One thing is certain — if you want your organization to stay ahead of the skills curve, you have to invest in developing existing talent.

In software development, maintaining skill levels isn’t easy or scalable. For most companies, it involves multiple sources of learning and professional development to get the right mix. For instance, while InnerWorkings focuses on improving developer skills, our partners at the International Association of Software Architects help companies to achieve excellence in architectural tools and industry best practices.

If you think you don’t need to care about improving the capabilities of your current engineers, you should check out the 2010 CAST Worldwide Application Software Quality Study. CAST puts a number on the cost of fixing code quality; basically you can expect to spend $1,000,000 fixing errors for every 340,000 lines of code created.

With this kind of financial incentive, you can significantly improve your operating margins by introducing effective performance-based training initiatives that develop existing talent and enable developers to apply techniques in difficult or unusual situations.

It’s all fine and dandy hiring in the best talent, but if you’re interested in bottom line impact of talent development for your software teams, we’d love to hear from you.

In hosting these webinars, our goal is to make common software management issues as real as possible and to offer thoughts and strategies that might be relevant to you in your work. We are also keen to share “war stories” that make the issues come alive. We’re extremely lucky to have Cerner’s Matt Anderson and Ryan McKenna joining us for this webinar. They were both deeply involved in the project to migrate a key product from a legacy system to the .NET framework and the challenges associated with that process.

When I do my own preparation for these webinars I like to find an angle that allows me to open the issues up. For this webinar, I discovered a Department of Defence white paper on Legacy System Migration Guidelines. Since DoD systems contain a substantial amount of legacy software and they have worked with many vendors to carry out migrations, they have evolved 10 guidelines which are built on lessons learned from actual legacy system migrations. On first reading, some of these guidelines are blindingly obvious. For example, guideline #1 recommends that you “Develop a comprehensive strategy with achievable and measurable milestones for each reengineering project”. Indeed — you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to agree with that one!

But some of the guidelines, when matched with the key approaches of the Cerner strategy, are really quite interesting and thought provoking. A couple of weeks ago, I spent a day with Cerner in Kansas City at their Innovation Center. We allocated one session to preparation for the webinar on Legacy System Migration to .NET. I was very struck during the meeting by the “Like-For-Like” strategy adopted by Cerner for the project. It’s not as simple as it sounds. Just think about it — you have a core product with many customers and users. It is a key revenue generator for the company. It has been developed over years. Now you need to move it to a new technology base. You decide on a “like-for-like” strategy, which means matching function for function, feature for feature. An ideal outcome would mean that users are not even aware of the change. But we all live and work in software. We know how products develop, how the outcome can change – sometimes in unexpected ways.

Then compare this decision with guidelines 4, 5 and 6 from the DoD white paper:

Guideline #4: Establish and maintain configuration management control of the legacy system
Guideline #5: There should be a carefully defined and documented process for the elicitation and validation of requirements
Guideline #6: Make software architecture a primary reengineering consideration

These three guidelines raise a ton of questions for me, which make the project, and decision-making around it, come alive. For example,
1. How are requirements for the new system documented?
2. Is the original architecture still valid under the new technology?
3. If not, what needs to change and what implications does it have for the project?
4. Does anything get dropped in the new system? What about the little funky features that wend their way into all products?
5. What about improvements and new features? Do they wait until the migration is done?

During the live webinar on April 14th, I will also ask our guest speakers about DoD guideline #3, which is near and dear to our hearts at InnerWorkings:

Guideline #3: If new technology is used for a project, provide adequate training in both the technical content and the motivation for change

The list of questions could go on – but the point is that these are real migration issues that Cerner grappled with, decided upon, and then executed against.

It is worth noting that Cerner’s migration project is complete now so we will also be able to talk about specific outcomes and lessons learned. The webcast will run for about 40 minutes and we will have a live Q&A after that where you can ask your own questions. So do join us. It promises to be a really interesting session.

We’ll explore the challenge of migrating pieces of your core software systems — essential to your company’s business — to the .NET Framework. Imagine overcoming this challenge when your software development organization is distributed across 8 global centers and supports more than 70 core systems.

How can you make it work? Find out how a major global healthcare company, Cerner Corporation, managed this tricky process. The company leveraged the new capabilities offered by the .NET Framework using an incremental rollout, and used several key migration strategies including:

• Center of Excellence for developer learning needs
• Open Forum to foster software team collaboration
• “Like for Like” development strategy

Come to this one-hour webcast to dig deep into this migration process, including results, productivity gains, reduced learning curve, and best practices for future migration projects.

The webcast is free, but seats are limited. Sign up today!

San Francisco, CA – Jan 31, 2011

The company will offer its entire catalog of .NET Framework coding challenges and performance support services to help L&T Infotech enhance developer skills. InnerWorkings Developer is scalable for geographically dispersed software teams, yet allows individual developers to receive in-depth feedback, code samples, and support.

“InnerWorkings is delighted to be chosen by L&T Infotech’s Developer & Platform Excellence team for this initiative,” said Mr. Francis McKeagney, CEO of InnerWorkings. “We are excited about working with L&T Infotech on our shared goal of driving .NET skills and programming excellence for enterprise developers on a large scale. InnerWorkings offers a best in class approach to improving developer performance and productivity within the enterprise. Developers gain validated programming skills with the very latest technologies while working almost exclusively in Visual Studio. We look forward to the successful execution of this strategic developer training program in conjunction with L&T Infotech.”

“L&T Infotech is committed to providing superior service to our customers by transforming knowledge into performance. We are pleased to see InnerWorkings as a key component of the L&T Infotech Developer and Platform Excellence Program. Developing effective software takes years of practice and experience accumulating techniques and tricks along the way. InnerWorkings allows us to provide our developers with this real-world experience in a safe sandbox, helping us to accelerate the delivery of higher quality solutions to our clients.” said Mr. Sudip Banerjee, CEO at L&T Infotech.

L&T Infotech developers will have access to InnerWorkings’ growing catalog of coding exercises on key technologies such as ASP.NET, .NET Framework 3.5x, AJAX Extensions, Visual Studio Team System, Silverlight, Enterprise Library, WPF, WCF and .NET Framework 4.0. Participating developers will also avail of InnerWorkings’ acclaimed code judging engine, Personal Tutor support service, full code search functionality, and the company’s extensive reference framework. The InnerWorkings learning environment is tightly embedded in Microsoft Visual Studio so developers can enjoy a more seamless and in-depth learning experience.

About InnerWorkings
At InnerWorkings, our mission is to help our customers build great software organizations. We believe that it is possible to create a successful, efficient, and cost-effective software organization and sustain it over multiple projects. How do we do this? By providing software executives with an integrated platform to improve learning, collaboration, and software processes across your development teams. InnerWorkings is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and Carnegie Mellon SEI Partner. The company’s R&D facility is based in Dublin, Ireland and InnerWorkings maintains its corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California. For more information about InnerWorkings and its services, visit www.innerworkings.com.

About L&T Infotech
Larsen & Toubro Infotech Ltd (L&T Infotech), one of the fastest growing IT Services companies, is ranked by NASSCOM as 8th largest Indian software & services exporter from India and is amongst NASSCOM’s Top 20 IT-BPO Employers in India (FY2009-10). It is also ranked 7th in DATAQUEST-IDC top 20 IT Best Employers Survey 2010. A wholly-owned subsidiary of Larsen & Toubro, a US$ 9.8 billion engineering, manufacturing & financial services organization with global operations, L&T Infotech is differentiated by its unique Business-to-IT Connect, which is a result of its rich corporate heritage.

We offer comprehensive, end-to-end software solutions and services in the following industry verticals: Banking & Financial Services; Insurance; Energy & Petrochemicals; Manufacturing (Consumer Packaged Goods/Retail, High-tech, Industrial Products,  Automotive), and Product Engineering Services (Telecom). Our new emerging verticals include Media & Entertainment and Life sciences & Healthcare. We also deliver business solutions to our clients in the following horizontals/Service Lines: SAP, Oracle, Infrastructure Management Services, Testing, Consulting and Business Process Services. Our other service offerings are: Business Analytics, Legacy Modernization, Applications Outsourcing, Architecture Consulting, Enterprise Integration, Service Oriented Architecture, Systems Integration and PLM. (www.Lntinfotech.com)

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