any of you sell .NET apps?

[MrPolite]

I'm wondering if anyone here makes any money by writing .NET apps?(That is, writing it on your own, not as a part of a company's production). Anyways if you do, please comment a little bit on these, or anything else that reaches your mind :

-who are your customers (individuals? companies?etc)
-about how much you charge them (and how? per hour? per program? etc)
-what type of program do you write for them
-WHERE and HOW you find your customers
-and do your customers know that they have to install the framework to run your app (any customers ever complain that they don't want to have the .net framework installed?)...
-any of your customers specificly ask that for the program to be written in .NET?

I'm just curious

[Hole-In-One]

1. Company

2. I just did per program. I found a compairable app's price and just added what I thought to that price.(Ended up doing OK)

3.Employee and Project Scheduling and Tracking (Database)

4. Actually the guy came looking for me, heard I could code, and asked me if I would write an app for him.

5. No

6. No

In the price I just included setup and training for the app. The company only had five employees, so training wasn't that bad. As far as support goes, I get a phone call about once a week with some stupid question "How do I do this? , Can it do that?".
But all in all it was a fairly good experience.

[MrPolite]

Originally posted by Hole-In-One
1. Company

2. I just did per program. I found a compairable app's price and just added what I thought to that price.(Ended up doing OK)

3.Employee and Project Scheduling and Tracking (Database)

4. Actually the guy came looking for me, heard I could code, and asked me if I would write an app for him.

5. No

6. No

In the price I just included setup and training for the app. The company only had five employees, so training wasn't that bad. As far as support goes, I get a phone call about once a week with some stupid question "How do I do this? , Can it do that?".
But all in all it was a fairly good experience.

hmm how much did you get paid? aah I really hate providing support to customers i just want to give them the app and say give me the money and get lost hehe

[hellswraith]

Support is where your biggest time sink will be.

What I would do is offer two versions of support. A per support request charge, and a flat fee for companies to pay. Specify response time as a day, not hours....trust me...lol.

Make the flat fee very expensive.

[nahya^^]

so... like how much?

i might think about minoring in programming (or something like that) if i could secure a job related to it (cause i'm gonna major in mathematics, so they're kinda related. i think). my community college offers 2 hour programming class at night, and the description says "VB" but i doubt it's VB.net. bleh.

anyhow.
couldn't you just make a helpfile for all those stupid questions? then you can tell them to "rtfm" or something like that

[MrPolite]

heh support can be a pain aaah
so what's the price range for making applications? I dont have any clues whatsoever...


I didnt write this to sell, but just using it as an example: I wrote a really basic program that lets you choose a bunch of images from a directory, then a destination directory, and it resizes them all at once, changes their image format, renames, and changes image quality depending on the options that you chose.... suppose there wasnt already a program like this and it was a custom order... would it have cost more than $100?

[Hole-In-One]

nahya^^,
I'm in the same boat your in. Thinking about going back to school for programming. Right now I'm leaning towards certification though (MCSD).
In my area an A.S. in Computer Programming runs about $34,000 for 18 months of school. Although there is a dell laptop included included in that price.
So a MCSD certificate for about $1200 (assuming I pass all the exams the first time!) is looking alot better to me!

[MrPolite]

Originally posted by Hole-In-One
nahya^^,
I'm in the same boat your in. Thinking about going back to school for programming. Right now I'm leaning towards certification though (MCSD).
In my area an A.S. in Computer Programming runs about $34,000 for 18 months of school. Although there is a dell laptop included included in that price.
So a MCSD certificate for about $1200 (assuming I pass all the exams the first time!) is looking alot better to me!

oh yeah! talking about certificates... I never really got the idea. If you have a good degree, why do you get a certificate? why do the companies look for these certificates exactly? having a masters or something like that isnt good enough?

[Hole-In-One]

Yeah I would definitely say a degree is 100 times better than a certificate, but a cert is alot less expensive! But like you said some companies do look for certs. I know a guy who got hired just for his cert, he had no college education at all.

[VBCrazyCoder]

I think that the certifications show that you have specific knowledge in a specific area (like vb). A degree shows that you have learned the concepts that you can apply across areas (vb, java, etc.).

Alot of companies don't really put to much faith in certs, unless they are looking for specific skills. But if you are trying to sell stuff on your own, the cert sure does look nice on your business card.

[nahya^^]

oh yeah certs cost less. i should try to get one.
is there one specific for vb.net?

[MrPolite]

hmm I didnt know they cost at all
where can I find a list of ms certificates... how much do they cost usually? how technical are they?

[acral]

Start here...

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/exams/70-306.asp