Cameron Fletcher

Sentence and Word Analysis #1

I was not put forward for a job recently because I had Windows Forms experience and not WinForms experience stated on my CV. The same agency also said I had not been singled out as they were looking for someone who had worked with MVC, unlike me as I had only worked with the Model View Controller framework.

I have come to understand that I have to not only write my CV to appeal to prospective employers who should know what I’m talking about but also for the multiple layers of incompetent individuals though which my CV must make its journey before arriving before someone who can actually read. I have come to refer to these individuals as the jam layer because whilst I am the icing on the cake (and most of the time, the cake itself - that is, after all, what I get paid for) they are the jam in-between because they have jam for brains.

So, I decided to analyse the results from a jobserve.com search for .NET roles based in the UK and identify the top used keywords and phrases so that I could litter my CV with them in the hope that someone with jam for brains would identify the correlation, even if they don't understand what that means.

To achieve this completed the following steps:

1. I wrote an RSS reader in C# that read my RSS feed (for .NET jobs based in UK) that I'd set up through jobserve.com.
2. The RSS reader then iterated through each posting and called a stored procedure in my SQL database that added the content of the job posting to a sentences table as a string.
3. I then had a stored procedure that split the string into words and added them to a words table along with details of the sentence they were in and their position within that sentence.
4. The more complex bit was looping through the words in each sentence concatenating from one to ten consecutive words together throughout the sentence and placing the resultant string into an analysis table.
5. I then performed a simple groupby query eliminating the conjunctives (and, or, as, etc.) to retrieve the results.

This took me a couple of hours and as jobserve.com only allows you to receive the last 24 hours worth of job postings via RSS I present you with the top 30 ranked words/phrases from 75 job postings (below). The rank column details the number of occurrences of that word within the 75 postings.

Annoyingly, these results are probably more use to anyone wishing to write an appealing CV profile about themselves. For my purposes I probably need a larger dataset to work on – I reckon about 500-600 job postings and more granular analysis of wordsets ie. group words into technical, competency based, business area, etc. – and also to look into maybe the top 100 from specific wordsets rather than just the top 30 generic words.

Part two of this post may be found here.

Posted: May 30 2009, 11:59 by flet0496 | Comments (2) |

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Microsoft Certifications

To help bolster the qualifications section of my CV I have decided to sit some Microsoft Certifications. This means I can start to use Microsoft Certified logos on correspondance and perhaps prospective employers will realise how awesome I am. I have decided to go down the .NET 2.0 route then sit the upgrade exams for .NET 3.5 (which haven't been released yet have now been released).

My planned Microsoft Certification roadmap can be found below. This is split down into phases in which I will do the exams. I have placed in brackets after each exam the number of people who currently hold the certification worldwide.

UPDATE: The exams that I've passed are marked with the pass dates in square brackets.

PHASE 1
70–536: MCP - Application Development Foundation (2,402,263 - MCP) [22/05/2009]
70–526: MCTS - .NET Framework 2.0: Windows Applications (20,194) [04/06/2009]
70–548: MCPD - Windows Developer (3,797) [08/06/2009]

PHASE 2
70-433: MCTS - SQL Server 2008, Database Development (456) [14/07/2009]
70-451: MCITP - Database Developer 2008 (213) [21/07/2009]

PHASE 3
70–528: MCTS - .NET Framework 2.0: Web Applications (43,207) [30/07/2009]
70–529: MCTS - .NET Framework 2.0: Distributed Applications (10,202) [03/07/2009]
70–549: MCPD - Enterprise Application Developer (7,717)

PHASE 4
70-432: MCTS - SQL Server 2008, Implementation and Maintenance (854)
70-450: MCITP - Database Administrator 2008 (358)

PHASE 5 (upgrade - this will also earn me 4 x MCTS in .NET 3.5)
70-568: MCPD - Enterprise Application Developer 3.5 (Part 1)
70-569: MCPD - Enterprise Application Developer 3.5 (Part 2) (25)

Posted: May 18 2009, 11:52 by flet0496 | Comments (2) |

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Internal Interfaces

Occasionally there is the need to expose, for the purposes of an API or such like, a property of a class that has different external and internal implementations. Consider the code below: a person class with an Id property that is set to -1 by default with an external get property and an internal set property.

public class Person
{
    private int _id = -1; // default value
 
    public int Id
    {
        get { return this._id; }
        internal set { this._id = value; }
    }
}

If there are several classes that implement the Id property in this manner and there is a need to reference them through a common interface externally then implementing the following on each of the classes should be sufficient:

public interface IIdentifiable
{
    int Id { get; }
}

However, to reference these classes internally using the same common interface may be insufficient as it does not allow a call to the internal set property. Clearly it would not be efficient, or necessarily easy, to cast the classes to their individual types prior to making the call. One solution is to use a separate interface for internal operations; an interface with internal scope:

internal interface IIdentifiableInternal : IIdentifiable
{
    new int Id { get; set; }
}

Here, we implement the IIdentifiable interface and declare the Id property as new, effectively hiding its IIdentifiable implementation. We don’t reflect this in quite the same manner in our implementation of the IIdentifiableInternal interface on our class though. Instead, we explicitly implement the IIdentifiableInternal interface:

public class Person : IIdentifiableInternal
{
    private int _id = -1; // default value
 
    public int Id
    {
        get { return this._id; }
    }
 
    int IIdentifiableInternal.Id
    {
        get { return this._id; }
        set { this._id = value; }
    }
}

The external members of the class now include the public get method of the Id property, as does the public IIdentifiable interface. However, internally the class can be referenced using the IIdentifiableInternal interface which allows access to both the get and set methods of the property.

What has been demonstrated is how to take a number of classes with common members that have both public and internal scope and provide a means to reference them through a common interface, both internally and externally.

As a final point, if you have a linked library which you want to have access to the internal interfaces then you can use the following assembly attribute to expose internal to the specified assembly:

[assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("MyLibrary.InterfaceExample")]

Posted: May 09 2009, 18:51 by flet0496 | Comments (3) |

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Overridden method OnMeasureItem is not being invoked

I just ran into an issue when subclassing the ComboBox class whereby the OnMeasureItem method that I was overriding was not being called. I had set the DrawMode to OwnerDrawFixed in the constructor for my ComboBox which had in turn filtered through to the designer (non-default value). When I amended the value in the constructor to OwnerDrawVariable the change did not then filter through to the designer (no surprises there). The result being that my constructor had the following code:

this.DrawMode = DrawMode.OwnerDrawVariable;

However, this was clearly at odds with the designer as illustrated in the figure below:

In order to stop this occurring again, and to stop any modification of the DrawMode via the designer, I changed the line in the constructor of my ComboBox to reference the base like so:

base.DrawMode = DrawMode.OwnerDrawVariable;

I then added the DrawMode property with the new keyword to replace the base version (see below). You need to include the property setter as the designer will still try to assign a value to DrawMode.

[Browsable(false)]
public new DrawMode DrawMode
{
    get { return base.DrawMode; }
    set { }
}

After tidying up the designer code everything works like a dream.

Posted: May 04 2009, 18:21 by flet0496 | Comments (1) |

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