My last post was somewhat negative. I acknowledge that. I was annoyed. Let me make amends by posting some useful, positive information for those who find themselves on the other end of the interview table (or phone).

1. Google Live Search your interviewer. Most recruiters will tell you who will be performing your interview. If they don't venture the information, then ask for it - chances are if they know then they will tell you. Take that name and do some research. Get to know what your interviewer is most likely to be questioning you about. If they have written a book on security best practices, then there is a pretty good chance they will ask you questions about security. Do drop subtle hints that you read their weblog - most tech people like to hear that - just be sparing in it. You don't want to come off as a stalker.
2. Be honest about your skill level. Many interviewers will ask you how you rate yourself, so that they can judge just how delusional you are. Be honest here. If you claim to be a 10 out of 10 in a subject area, then you had better be an absolute expert. A 10 out of 10 is expected to know that subject inside and out, perhaps even teach the interviewer a thing or two. Don't be too humble though. Rating yourself as a 2 out of 10 is highly unlikely to get you into the interview room in the first place.
3. Don't interrupt. When the interviewer is speaking, never (and I mean NEVER) forcibly interrupt them. I have had many interviews where the candidate would inject words, statements, or questions while I was trying to guide the interview towards the next topic. Doing that does not impress the interviewer with your profound wisdom. What it does is send a clear message that you feel your thoughts are more important than the interviewer's... which is nothing but a fast track to bottom of the resume stack.
4. Speak clearly. No need to shout, but you should be certain that you speak confidently and with ample volume to be heard clearly. Avoid slang terms - especially cursing! Try to provide concise and accurate answers, with as few "umms" as possible. And for heavens sake, if you don't know the answer to a question, just say it rather than trying to BS your way through it.
5. Be prepared to ask questions about the employer's business and work environment. Even if you already know the answers (you did research the company's website beforehand, didn't you?). This shows an interest in the company and team.
6. Be prepared to answer strange, sometimes seemingly irrelevant questions during the interview. Good interviewers are not looking for right or wrong answers to every question - they are looking for clues about how you work your way through problems and how you are able to handle stressful situations. This is especially true in the Consulting industry, where your reaction to a crisis is often more visible and more important than the act of correcting the underlying problem itself.
7. Follow-up. If you already did a technical screening and are now in for the "big face to face" interview, chances are good that you missed at least one of the questions during the screening. You should note those questions during the initial interview, and research them before going to the main interview - especially if the interviewer is the same person. Let them know that you felt compelled to research the topic on your own time, and that you now have an answer for that missed question if they would like to hear it. Chances are they won't want to hear the answer, but they will take notice that you followed up and did your homework in between the interviews.
8. Be calm. It is normal to be nervous. Some folks even have obvious nervous twitches that come out in full color during something as stressful as an interview (sweating, fast talking, jittering). Take a few steps to defeat those demons beforehand - exercise rigorously the morning before your interview, this will clear your mind and stabilize your metabolism, which helps control sweating problems. Learn some deep breathing exercises if you need help calming down beforehand. Never, under any circumstances, drink a "Double Vente Latte Machiatto" or other "energy drink" less than an hour before the interview. All that caffeine will lead to a panicky interviewee that talks WAY too fast and incoherently, and that is trying to hold their bladder for an hour. Nothing good can come of that.
9. Sleep well the night before. Don't study your "interview cheat sheet" late into the night. Go to bed early, and go to bed with a clear mind. You will not sleep well if you spend the night ruminating over those questions and answers. In fact, I understand that taking an over-the-counter aid (if you are healthy enough) can help. Seasickness medications such as Bonine can clear nausea from "stomach butterflies" that might precede a stressful interview, and also have the nice side effect of being a sleeping aid (causes drowsiness). As always, check with your doctor before taking something like that.
10. Smile. The interviewer is not only looking to see if you know the technical answers to their questions, they are also evaluating whether they would want to work with you on a team or not, and if you know how to enjoy working with others. When interviewing, the measuring stick I often use is to ask myself "Would I be comfortable having a beer after work with this person?". You might be surprised how often the answer to that is "no" (especially in the ultra-bizarre circus of tech workers).

And here is a "bonus" tip submitted by David Daughtrey...

11. Dont eat at the Wing Factory on the night before an interview. Or any hot wing establishment for that matter.

I have been in this industry for quite a while... about 15 years. I have spent the majority of that time in upper-tier roles, or at least as "upper tier" as it can be without losing touch with the technology itself. I am one of those "hands-on" folks that would never ask a person on my team to build something that I wasn't 100% positive that I could (and would) do myself. As a result, my technical skills have always been kept sharp.

And because of those very solid technical skills, I have almost always been deeply involved in the recruitment and interview process at whatever companies I have worked for. I typically perform several interviews per month, sometimes more, sometimes less, generally depending on hiring urgency or other market conditions. But this morning I have had without a doubt the WORST interview I have ever had to participate in. I will not divulge the name or anything else about this person, as that's not my style, so please do not ask. But what I can do is provide some advice on things you should NOT do unless you really want to bomb an interview horribly...

What NOT to do in an interview:

1. If you are asked to "self rate" yourself, give yourself a 9 out of 10 in a new "buzz" technology that you really don't know much about. The interviewer won't know the difference anyway.
2. Give the recruiter your cell phone number even though you know you get horrible reception where you expect to be taking technical screening calls.
3. Before starting a technical screening, be sure to tell the interviewer that your skills are "more broad than deep" so that they will see just how fabulously excellent you are even if you miss a bunch of the questions.
4. When the interviewer asks an entry-level question that you don't know, complain that "those kinds of nitpicking questions are for a more junior person than me", and follow it by "I usually manage people who would answer those kinds of questions".
5. Try to turn the tables on the interviewer if you don't think you are doing well. Try to convince them that they are being unreasonable by asking them a technical question of your own. The idea here is to make sure that they can't answer it correctly - in fact, just make something up! Here is a good one to try: "what’s the parameter five of the MoveWindow?". Without a doubt, you will have made your point to the interviewer.
6. Be sure to argue with the interviewer that they are wrong about their own entry-level question. After all, only a moron would claim that "SQL Server" was one of the three "out of the box" configurable options for Session State storage in ASP.NET.
7. Remember, nothing can prove you wrong, not even Truth itself. If the interviewer isn't asking you the questions that you want them to ask, then it is surely because they are not worth your time. In fact, you should tell them that they ask too many nitpicking questions, and then hang up on them.

What a complete tool.

While it probably will not get as much attention as a Visual Studio or Windows Service Pack release, the Expression Team blog announced that there is an SP now available for Expression Design that solves some very nagging issues with the RTM version of the product. These problems mostly impacted those of us using Design and Blend with Silverlight, most were a nuisance and had workarounds, but this update really improves the "flow" of creating a Silverlight or WPF UI.

Some of the "big" fixes from my perspective:

• Gradient Midpoints are now exported (glass fanatics across the globe rejoiced). This was one of my pet peeves with gradients - you could use Midpoints to create truly spectacular glass and glow effects in Design - but they would end up more along the lines of "craptacular" when exported to XAML. The workaround wasn't 100% equivalent, and was fairly annoying (convert midpoints to new gradient stops before exporting).
• Exporting to XAML will now emit the correct (forward) slash character in image paths for Silverlight exports. This was an annoying problem when Silverlight 1.0 was sent to RTM and no longer supported the backslash.
• Text exported as TextBlocks instead of Paths. Thatsa verra niiice!

One thing that hasn't been addressed that still bugs me is how the exporter handles layers: Each layer becomes a canvas stacked, each stacked on top of the other. This isn't inherently troublesome, except that the canvases all start at 0,0 and fill the workspace... which basically means that only the topmost canvas will recieve mouse events by default. It would be better if the exported canvases were only as large as they needed to be, and positioned accordingly.

Then again, I guess I could always file a bug/suggestion report that would be more likely to be seen by the Expression Team...

John Robbins, the wizard of debugging, is looking for suggestions for the Devscovery 2008 Keynotes. To encourage submissions, he is offering a FREE conference pass to the person with the best idea. Full price for such a pass is $900, which is a bargain in itself, but FREE is even BETTER!

The spring Devscovery will be in New York, and the fall Devscovery will be held in Redmond - the winner will get to choose which event they prefer to attend. Having attended the fall Redmond conference this year, I HIGHLY recommend it! Even if I weren't a Wintellect employee, I would still be comfortable claiming that this is hands-down the best way to spend your training time and budget.

To submit a keynote idea, please either comment on John's post here or email your suggestion directly to him. You can submit as many ideas as you like.

I haven't posted much recently. Not that I haven't had anything to say, but I have just been really quite busy. In fact, I just returned from my first visit to the Netherlands and England, where I spent a few weeks vacationing, I mean working, on a solution architecture assessment for one of our clients.

Accounts vary, but here is more or less how the first day of our trip unfolded (according to my admittedly hazy recollection):

We arrived at Schipol airport in Amsterdam on Sunday morning. Early on Sunday morning... 6:30 AM to be exact. But we could not check into our hotel in Emmen (almost a 2 hour drive from Amsterdam) until later in the afternoon, so we decided to explore the city a little. But first thing's first - it was early in the morning, and Roger needed a cup of coffee. After asking a number of locals where we could find the nearest "coffee house" and getting puzzled facial expressions in return (or the odd "isn't it rather early in the morning for that?"), we decided to take matters into our own hands. So we punch in the instructions to Roger's GPS-enabled PDA...

Within a few short minutes, the GPS has located a suitable establishment. There is just one problem - the "road" it sends us down appears to cross this body of water somehow (I don't see a bridge or tunnel...):

No worries. We select the next place in the list. Just a few miles, err kilometers (we are in Europe now) away. So we forge ahead, and lo and behold...

Apparently Roger's PDA thought we were looking for really large, red trash containers. Undaunted, we press on. The third entry in the GPS list looks more promising, so again we follow it's directions. We get to see some interesting places along the way...

And finally we arrived at the cafe. The coffee seemed to really help Roger's alertness for the rest of the morning, but I did notice he had difficulty concentrating on things and carried a bizarre grin for hours...

With our morning caffeine secured, we decided to spend the rest of the day exploring the history and architecture of Amsterdam. Our first stop was the museum, where we both learned a lot about things that happened in our families' past:

We admired the remarkable structural engineering of the Dutch. I was especially impressed with their uncanny ability to build perferctly level buildings on flat land.

By the end of the morning we were quite tired. We found a group of people who seemed like locals, and asked them where they would recommend we stop for lunch.

They were very helpful indeed, and pointed us to a nearby establishment where we had a bite to eat and were able to quench our thirst. I must say, the tap water there is significantly more tasty than what we have here in in the US.