The Spotlight is on Stephen Walther Mr. Walther wrote some of our ASP content and is currently authoring some of our VB.Net content.

RN: Please tell us a little about yourself.

WALTHER: I've just spent that last four months building the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit, an application that Microsoft is distributing to illustrate best practices for developing ASP.NET applications. This application enables you to create a complete Web site -- including a discussion, articles, downloads, books, and photo gallery area -- without writing a single line of code. Microsoft is distributing it for free to the ASP.NET community.

I'm excited about this application, since it takes advantage of several advanced features of the ASP.NET Framework. For example, the Community Starter Kit supports skins, so that you can radically alter the appearance of a Web site that you create with the Community Starter Kit simply by selecting a new skin from a dropdown list. It also enables you to create any directory structure for your Web site that you desire since every page in the application is dynamically generated from a database. Okay, I could keep going on about this application forever, since as you can probably tell, I'm pretty excited about it.

While finishing up the Community Starter Kit, I also finished my lastest book entitled ASP.NET Kick Start. This introductory book on ASP.NET covers building ASP.NET Web applications using the Visual Studio .NET development environment. Since all the code samples in the book are presented in both C# and VB.NET, writing the book gave me the opportunity to compare the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two programming languages.

I've also been doing a lot of traveling lately with my wife, Ruth Walther, to companies throughout the United States to teach workshops on ASP.NET through my company AspWorkshops.com. Unlike most people, I actually find traveling enjoyable (I like airline snacks). The past year has given me the opportunity to visit a number of areas of the United States that I wouldn't normally have an excuse to visit such as Raleigh, New Orleans, New York, Boston, Phoenix, and even Helena, Montana.

Finally, I've been working on the new edition of my book ASP.NET Unleashed. I've learned a lot of new tricks since I wrote the first edition two years ago. I feel lucky that I'll have the opportunity to publish a new edition later this year.

RN: What interested you in writing ReviewNet tests?

WALTHER: ASP.NET is a hot profession in an otherwise dreary economy. Through my training company, AspWorkshops.com, I interact with a number of companies who are actively seeking ASP.NET developers. The complaint that I always hear, however, is that there is an overabundance of developers with ASP.NET on their resumes who don't really have the experience to build ASP.NET applications. These companies need tests, like the ASP.NET tests offered by ReviewNet, in order to quickly identify developers who have the necessary skills.

RN: Tell us a little about your ReviewNet test.

WALTHER: I designed the test that I created for ReviewNet to identify developers who have real, working experience building ASP.NET applications. There are certain problems and solutions that every ASP.NET developer encounters when building applications. They get stuck on the problem once, they solve it, and they remember the solution in the future. The ASP.NET test was designed so that IT departments can differentiate developers with working knowledge of ASP.NET from developers who have a cursory understanding of the technology.

RN: What advice would you give to someone learning your discipline? Are there significant barriers to learning about this subject?

WALTHER: own a training company (AspWorkshops.com), so I have a strong belief in the value of instructor led training when learning ASP.NET. The ASP.NET Framework is huge -- there's a lot of material to cover. The primary benefit of training is that it allows students to quickly get an idea of what you can do with the technology.

I also firmly believe that you cannot learn how to program using any technology without lots of practice building real world applications. In our training workshops, students spend a significant portion of their time building ASP.NET mini applications, so they can solidify their conceptual understanding through hands-on experience. If you want to learn ASP.NET on your own, I encourage you to buy a good ASP.NET book (for example, ASP.NET Unleashed or ASP.NET Kick Start) and tackle building a simple ASP.NET Web site.

RN: When did you decide to get into the Information Technology field?

WALTHER: I got involved in the Information Technology field while I was a Ph.D. candidate at M.I.T in the department of Linguistics and Philosophy. I was teaching an introductory class on philosophy at Harvard when the Internet exploded and I took notice. I dropped out of the Ph.D. program and wrote a Web site called Collegescape that enabled students to apply to college through the Internet. The startup took off. Harvard, Stanford, M.I.T. and over 200 other colleges started using the Web site to accept college applications. I've never regretted my decision to drop out.