Let’s face it — we live in a world obsessed by certificates. All the important life stages — birth, graduation, marriage, home ownership, death — are all marked with solemn and official looking piece of paper.

The role of certificates is certainly prominent in our professional lives too. Apply for a software development position and your potential employer will usually ask for physical proof of your diploma, degree, or certification. In many instances, that official piece of paper or digital certificate really counts.

At InnerWorkings, we introduced our certificates of achievement for .NET developers about 2 years ago. I recall that we questioned the effect of certificates on our developer audience at the time.

Would people appreciate the validation and visible recognition of a job well done, or would it simply be an annoyance without much objective value?

Thankfully, the response from our developer community to receiving our certificates of achievement has been overwhelmingly positive.

The premise behind our certificate model is simple — for every Drill (3 hours of .NET coding exercises) that you complete successfully, you receive a digital certificate from our learning platform.

Our certificate threshold is very high, I might add — you’re required to post a perfect 100% score in each coding task before the system will recognize your achievement. It’s not that we are biased towards perfectionists, I protest; we simply take the view that an application which is 97% secure isn’t going to cut it with your customers in the real world.

Since introducing the certificate system into our developer community, our platform has issued almost 20,000 unique certificates of achievement to individual developers. Think of all the rain forests we’ve saved by opting for digital certificates, eh?

Feedback on our certificate feature has been really positive too — it’s clear that developers in our learning environment are delighted to receive recognition of their hard work in getting to grips with new and often difficult .NET technologies.

Peer recognition is always a nice bonus, so many developers choose to share their hard earned certificates on social networks or add them to their resumes. Go on, we encourage you to brag a little!

In the end, I think it’s human nature to want a physical record of our achievements and recognition of our skills — imagine the Olympic Games without medal ceremonies, or the World Cup without that stunning gold trophy.

So if you’re in the business of building a community of practice where people contribute significant time and effort, I’d highly recommend that you consider a certificate system to reward your users. It’s likely to generate good feeling among your most dedicated followers and I promise it’s much less painful than a trip to the local government office to retrieve your birth certificate!

If you’re at TechEd 2010 in New Orleans this week, I think you’ll be interested in the following announcement.

InnerWorkings has teamed up with our .NET training partner Pluralsight to offer developers access to a very powerful combined learning solution.

TechEd attendees will get the best of Pluralsight’s acclaimed on-demand training videos from industry experts alongside InnerWorkings’ award-winning learning tool embedded in Visual Studio.

Both our training solutions are available for the price of a single annual subscription — a great deal for folks at the show.

So if you’re at TechEd, please visit the InnerWorkings booth (#2632) or the Pluralsight booth (#2544) and we’ll provide more information about this amazing deal. Inquiries can also be sent to sales@innerworkings.com or pssales@pluralsight.com.

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Over the years at InnerWorkings, we’ve teamed up with enough developer communities and local user groups to fill a small stadium. We’ve sponsored dozens of developer-centric events by offering free training, hosting contests, and giving away spot prizes.

Such user group activity is typically a positive experience with good intentions on both sides — organizers bring tangible value to the development community and vendors get meaningful product exposure to an influential group of developers and architects. Fair enough.

But these local efforts seem almost quaint in the shadow of some very large developer communities that boast incredible scale and reach. For me, it has been remarkable to watch the emergence of these massive, highly networked developer communities in the past few years.

Just for kicks, I’ve put together an informal list of these substantial developer communities — it’s admittedly a little .NET centric and apologies in advance for those I’ve omitted (but feel free to fill in the gaps in your comments):

• StackOverflow
• The Code Project
• DotNetKicks
• DZone
• Codeplex
• DotNetSlackers
• DeveloperFusion
• C# Corner
• INETA
• MSDN

Most of these communities have morphed from relatively humble beginnings into web powerhouses with millions of active contributors. StackOverflow is probably the most successful implementation of a beautifully simple community idea — creating a technology agnostic Q&A site for programmers that is collaborative and peer-reviewed. I think of it as Wikipedia for developers, and it’s great.

Another example of a developer community on steroids is The Code Project. It’s .NET centric but has racked up over 7 million members since inception, with tens of thousands of developers online at any given time. Everywhere you look, the scale of these successful communities is staggering.

So what is driving this rapid growth in online communities and programming forums? Certainly the increasing sophistication of community sites and the explosion of social networking behavior among users is a key factor.

But we also know that the demand for credible and useful technical information is almost insatiable among professional developers. In our experience at InnerWorkings, it’s clear that software development is one of the most knowledge intensive industries around today. Developers solve problems for a living and they believe in the power of community and collective knowledge to help them out when in a bind.

Whatever the driving factors, I wish all these mammoth communities the best of luck in serving their many millions of developers while crafting an unobtrusive advertising model to pay the bills. It’s a delicate balance for sure, but reaching competitive scale is a critical advantage when you’re building a community of any kind. For the architects of today’s software development communities, you have built it and they have come.

We’ve seen quite a metamorphosis in the world of software development over the past couple of years. It wasn’t all that long ago when developers were faced with a four basic career choices:

• Work as a code scribe for a monolithic software empire — go big.
• Create vertical solutions for an independent software vendor — go deep.
• Build a stealth product for a dinky little startup — go small.
• Run as an independent consultant — go alone.

OK, so I might be a little reductive in my argument, but you get the point. As a professional developer, you could choose to be part of a team (small, medium, large) or you could fight for scarce contract work in the big, bad world as a consultant. Finding a market for your own solutions was a bit like finding the next Fred Astaire on America’s Got Talent — always possible, but not likely.

Everything changed with the advent of the application marketplace, however. A vast ecosystem of apps has grown up around the mobile devices that we cling to in almost every conceivable location and situation — once off limits restaurants, golf clubs, and even restrooms (sadly, yes) are filled with the pings of text messages and full scale phone conversations today.

But good things have come from this ubiquity of mobile devices too. Software companies and individual developers responded to our ‘always on’ web experience with an overwhelming torrent of both niche and general business applications, ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime.

Clearly Apple has been at the epicenter of this movement with 100,000+ applications released to the App Store (as of early 2010). Taking a conservative number, Google’s mobile platform accumulated 38,000+ Android apps in a much shorter space of time.

New devices only add fuel to this app inferno — I read today that Apple’s iPad has just sold over 1 million units, with 12 million apps downloaded, in less than a calendar month, opening up a whole new category of touch screen apps that didn’t exist 12 months ago.

The volume of new applications is not limited to consumer devices and trivial apps, mind you. Enterprise application marketplaces are also thriving — Salesforce.com leads the way with 890+ AppExchange apps and a huge combined user base.

I’ve written in the past about how we use VerticalResponse within the AppExchange suite to manage our email communications at InnerWorkings. The hosted app is so seamlessly integrated with Salesforce.com that we’ve barely glanced at their standalone product.

The list of application marketplaces continues to grow elsewhere too — with the likes of Google Apps and Zoho offering a virtual buffet of productivity and collaboration apps to a hungry world of business users.

Twitter and Facebook continue to offer a massive audience for all kinds of applications that play by the rules of their underlying platform and APIs. Some of these apps will break out of their niche status and become self-sustaining, profitable entities that will make their owners wealthy and their users very happy. Others will be cannibalized by the natural expansion of the underlying platform and disappear without a trace.

In any case, this is a brave new world for application developers. I think it’s still true to say that great ideas with careful execution are the best recipe for success, but the emergence of these massive application marketplaces puts the world at a developer’s feet. Go forth. Multiply. Be careful. And don’t use your phone in the restroom.

Visual Studio 2010 will be released to market on April 12th, a big day for Microsoft’s Developer Tools Division. It also promises to be a big day for all developers and software teams building applications in the Visual Studio IDE.

Microsoft still favors the big splash approach to product launch, which I have expressed my misgivings about in the past. To be fair, although they persist with this most conventional launch program, plenty of community building and groundswell activities underpin each big hoopla event these days.

But the real meat of this story is not how Microsoft launches Visual Studio 2010 but rather what enhancements to expect in this RTM. So what is pegged for inclusion in this release of Visual Studio?

Michael Desmond has published an excellent article on The Making of Visual Studio 2010, which features comments from Dave Mendlen (Director of Developer Marketing at Microsoft), Rob Sanfilippo (Analyst at Directions on Microsoft) and Chris Dias (Microsoft Program Manager for VS 2010) among others.

Visual Studio was originally scheduled to RTM on March 22, 2010 – oops, yet another drawback of the big splash approach! A decision to push the launch date back to April was taken in response to horrible Beta 2 feedback on the IDE’s performance and stability following PDC in Los Angeles late last year.

No doubt some poor soul had to tiptoe into Steve Ballmer’s office with that heavy news. But Microsoft is nothing if not persistent, and moving the release date out appears to have given the product team some breathing room to recover lost ground and get the release back on track.

So what will we see for all those angst ridden days of slipping ship dates and general uncertainty? Clearly, the general consensus affirms that this release of Visual Studio 2010 is an ambitious one. 

The code base for Visual Studio 2008 had begun to resemble the proverbial big ball of mud, with over 10 years of legacy code and hundreds of different developer thumbprints all over it.

According to Chris Dias, a decision was made to step back and focus on the Visual Studio platform for the “long-term health and well being” of the franchise.

But it’s no picnic to translate such lofty franchise affirming goals into a commercial product release. As you might expect, the Visual Studio team took a good look around to see what was happening inside all those outwardly drab buildings on the Redmond campus. As a result, Visual Studio 2010 draws heavily on the work of companion product groups at Microsoft, particularly those working on WPF 4, Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF), Silverlight 4, and SharePoint.

Michael Desmond’s article explains that the look and feel of Visual Studio’s UI will be largely driven by WPF 4, and it’s telling that Microsoft moved the WPF and Visual Studio teams into an adjacent space in Building 41 to collaborate.

Finding and interfacing with other software components and the ability to customize the Visual Studio IDE will fall to MEF, allowing developers to replace features or enhance the IDE to suit their needs.

Although Silverlight 4 has been baked into this release, we’re told that developers will have to wait until the summer perhaps before the new Silverlight 4 tooling and functionality is available within Visual Studio 2010

SharePoint integration posed a number of challenges, not least of which was the need to make a 32 bit Visual Studio environment work with SharePoint’s 64 bit platform. We are led to believe that the VS and SharePoint product teams managed to work out these differences.

So we are left with an RTM of Visual Studio that is both extensive in scope and ambitious in nature. Desmond’s article quotes Gartner’s application development analyst Mark Driver describing Visual Studio 2010 as “probably the biggest change since .NET first came out”.

Strong words indeed. I remember when the .NET framework was first announced at PDC in 2000, so it’s quite a leap to suggest that this version of Visual Studio will be as ground-breaking as that release. As a good friend of mine is very fond of saying, we’ll see…