The following is a basic skill that every developer should have – even those who have been developing for just a few days:  Searching the Internet.

Yes, that’s it, folks.  How many developers still don’t have this skill?  How many newsgroup posts could be avoided by a simple Internet search.  A favorite developer search is Google because we can do a search, and if an article doesn’t pop up, we can “group” it, and somebody is bound to have made a newsgroup post about it already (with an answer).

I’ve answered many newsgroup posts just by doing the google search for them.  Am I helping them or hurting them?  For instance, in the ASP.NET newsgroup yesterday there was a question as to what other ASP.NET IDEs were out there besides VS and Web Matrix?  Wow, what a tough question.  Let’s do a search and find out instantly. . . or I can post a newsgroup post and hope to get an answer by the next day or day after that.

What’s worse is to find a newsgroup post of this level posted by someone with MCAD or MCSD by their name. . . *gasp*