Budding Developer Needs Help!

Great, that's pretty much what I was hoping to hear. But aside from this, I'm interested in knowing what else he can do to break into the field. Are the certifications worth it?

I might look at the MCSD .Net certification. But no matter what certification you end up getting chances are that in 2 years its not going to be worth much. I have seen many certifications come and go in the past few years. MCSD .Net was the one to get last year, but if memory serves me correctly, I think that even that certification has been recently replaced with something else. Unless they are a quick learner, and can obtain an entire certification within about a year, chances are by the time they actually get that certification it will be updated/replaced, etc... Its not a field you can study hard for, get a certification and be done with it. You will never stop studdying. Developers that stop studdying end up only being replaced just like the certifications they neglected to study for.

I believe that getting a job in the software industry is like any other career, its more of who you know, not what you know. If you want to get into Microsoft, sure go spend several years in college and spend $100,000 on college courses, etc... only to find that they have thousands of applications comming in every few weeks, and your friend is fresh blood. What expierences do they have that's going to stop Microsoft from using their application as confetti for the next company party?

Maybe start off by reading some books, and writting some smaller applications, then impress some small software company with your own working solutions they can install and run. Stay with them for several years and get the expierence required along with additional training. By the time they finish 4+ years of college they will already have about 5 years expierence.

I guess it also depends on what their goal is. Do they want to work for some large company, like Microsoft or do they want to start their own freelance company? Large companies are going to demand certifications, because they understand what's involved in getting them, and that they prove you know what you are doing. On the other hand, for a simple freelance programmer, your client most likely itsn't going to care that you are MCSD .Net certified, most likely they won't even know what it means. But if you can set a bunch of working applicaitons on their desk they can install and run, they will see what you can do, and there's a fair chance to impress them at that point.