I recently decided to add a custom domain name to a free Azure website that I use for development purposes. As the FREE Azure web site model doesn’t support custom domains (a shame but hard to comp...
Microsoft unfortunately recently announced the demise of the TechNet Subscription. Whilst I appreciate that TechNet download abuse must contribute towards the availability of pirated products, I st...
Recently I got this error connecting to a SQL Server Compact database from .Net: “An overflow occurred while converting to datetime.” So I dug into my data insertion code (I was using the e...
In my popular post on “The Future of the IT Department” I covered how IT is changing rapidly in enterprises and touched on how business aligned IT teams are going to become more relevant. Some of t...
Despite being an age old problem in the IT industry (and presumably a problem in other industries) it still concerns me how we have to rely so much on estimates to manage resources on complex multi...
I like Ubuntu and I enjoy using it, although I’m still a windows guy at heart (at least for the time being anyhow but we’ll see if Win8 ever grows on me) and I use a lot of Windows only apps. The a...
If you haven’t checked out TFS Service from Microsoft then I thoroughly recommend trying it out. It is basically a TFS instance in the cloud and at the moment its free for everyone to use and there...
Now I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions and in fact have the same one each year which I religiously stick to, which is to never make any New Years Resolutions. However whilst we are all i...
I previously blogged how I value podcasts as I find them an excellent way to maximise the use of my daily commute time. I thought I’d provide an updated list of the technology related podcasts I ...
Kids love playing on tablets and smart phones, and I think the excellent Nexus 7 will be a popular choice for Christmas Stockings this year. Apparently though in-app purchases for children’s mobile...
The recently released Version 1.4 of my Windows Live Writer plug-in for Syntax Highlighting resolved some HTML encoding issues experienced by some users. It seems however that this fix has had a kn...
For a current project I needed to perform a simple screen scrape action. The resulting solution was functional but a bit rough and ready. Luckily I stumbled upon this open-source HTML library proje...
A basic sequence diagram can be a very powerful tool to explain the interactions in a system but drawing them can often be too time consuming to bother for disposable uses. I find that many people ...
Have you ever wanted to export your unit test results from Visual Studio or your TFS Build? Sometimes you may need to provide evidence of your unit testing position to a project stakeholder. This m...
This interesting post by PEG recently highlights an organisations culture as being in reality the only differentiating factor that they have. In his view assets, IP, cost competitiveness, brand and...
I’m pleased to announce the release of version 1.4.0 of my Windows Live Writer (WLW) Source Code Highlighter plugin for WordPress.com hosted blogs. For those not aware of this plugin it enables you...
In previous posts I covered an introduction to Kanban and a review of a trial Kanban project. In this, my third in a series of Kanban posts, I’ll cover physical versus software Kanban boards. For ...
Recently I introduced Kanban to an inflight development project with the objective of trialling this technique with the team to raise productivity by overcoming various communication and process is...
Recently I introduced Kanban to an inflight development project with the objective of trialling this technique with a hope to raising productivity by overcoming various communication and process is...
In this interesting Forrester post about embracing the open web Jeffrey Hammond highlights the presence of two different developer communities. In his words: “…there are two different developer...
A study published in the Harvard Business Review has again shown that many IT projects continue to come in late and over budget. In addition it shows that there is a higher than expected number ...
We have made huge advances over recent years in the tools available to the development team, including the more proactive and investigative tools (profiling tools, code analysis, performance analys...
Sometimes, despite Visual Studio being an excellent IDE, you want to go the No VS route and hack your code in notepad. Perhaps you just want to make a quick change and its not worth firing up the f...
I’m a big fan of SlickRun and if you’ve not used it I recommend you download it and give it a try. I find it an invaluable tool not only for launching apps but also web sites, collections of applic...
For anyone interesting in free online .Net & Microsoft platform development training here is a list of links I’ve compiled recently for my development team: Free Plural Sight Courses: ...