I was sitting at a table this morning during breakfast here at DevConnections.  I was a bit in stealth mode since I enjoy listening to conversations around developer stuff, especially concerning Microsoft, without people knowing I am from Microsoft.  The second people find out I work for Microsoft, the nature of conversations often change and often times you either get very vanilla feedback about Microsoft or a never ending harangue of "this is wrong", "this is stupid", etc.  Not that negative feedback is wrong, but its hard to change the conversation once it gets started without seeming either defensive or indifferent.

This morning, two guys were discussing the state of their respective economies from a software development perspective.  I couldn't see where they were from but it sounded somewhere in the midwest based on accent and t-shirts slogans. ;-)  What was interesting about the conversation was thought both guys were in places where developers were getting hired, jobs where interesting, and things sounded pretty rosy.  But what was disturbing, and continues to be, is that apparently colleges continue to do a poor job of preparing graduates for the real world of software development.  Not from a theory or foundational knowledge perspective, but from a tool experience perspective.

Both guys talked about how they are having a very hard time hiring college graduates to help them do their .NET development.  It seems that colleges don't spend a lot of time, if any, teaching students about the Microsoft platform.  I'm not saying that that is the only thing they should  be doing, but at least some solid exposure seems to be in order.  Neither person at my table could find graduates who knew anything about basic things like ASP.NET, WinForms, etc.  Occasionally someone had exposure to C#, but nothing really beyond the BCL sorts of things.  Now, it seems that these same graduates have experience in developing on Java, PHP, and straight C/C++ on Linux, but no Microsoft dev tools.

Considering market momentum, job market, market share of Microsoft dev tools, etc. it seems a shame that students are getting more exposure to the Microsoft platform.  This has been a dilemma for Microsoft for quite some time.  In the beginning, we were up against Java inertia and .NET "newness", but now there really doesn't seem to be any good reasons that CompSci students don't get a fundamental understanding of the Microsoft dev stack.