New Kids on the Block

Recently a few new folks joined the ASP.NET team and I had the privilege to train them on "Troubleshooting ASP.NET" for a couple of days, but i don't think i did a fair job of training them at troubleshooting.

Honestly speaking i have never really found effective ways to talk about Troubleshooting ASP.NET. More because i don't know where to start. ASP.NET is a technology rather than a product. It runs on top of the .NET Framework and IIS. Visual Studio on the other hand is a IDE that helps us in writing ASP.NET applications in a much more efficient way.

The kind of problems we get are really different. They can vary from troubleshooting an issue related to Performance where customer is reporting that his ASPX pages are taking 25 secs to load to troubleshooting issues related to pure code, where some customer might be wanting to extend the GridView control.

At Microsoft, I believe we do a fair job in training folks, but we do follow the 70/20/10 rule. Where we get 70% of our learning on the Job (that means taking support calls and troubleshooting the issues) and 10% of time in Training. But when i mean on the Job training, that doesnt mean we leave the Support Engineer on his own to figure things out. There are a bunch of people, starting from his mentor, Technical Lead, Manager and Escalation Services that pitch in when the engineer is not sure about how to proceed and give that extra push to get the problem resolved.

By the way, just as a note. The training we deliver in classroom is also available on the Internet at the following address.

Learn With PSS
https://www.asp.net/learn/withpss/default.aspx