Unfortunately the tyranny of distance has kept me well and truly away from Microsoft PDC09 [http://microsoftpdc.com] but it hasn’t meant I’ve had to miss out completely. Seeing so much exciting information released about new technology (which happens to be my favourite kind!) made me want to get what excited me down online. Silverlight 4 Beta In case you’re feeling like it was only yesterday that Silverlight 3 was released, you’re almost right; it was back in July. The velocity of this product...

Often times in the software industry you’ll hear statements suggesting that the quality of  the underlying software code is really not that important and what matters most is immediate term customer satisfaction, primarily achieved by delivering what they asked for within time and budget. This is usually a position put forward by the customer facing folks within the software industry who, in their defence, probably don’t have that strong a grasp on why code quality is important simply because th...

Recently I’ve gone through a particularly intensive training program. This program has required a significant contribution of money, time and energy and although it has already been running for four weeks, has only just begun. The thing is though, its already made me a better programmer and the course is pretty easily accessible, in fact some people even stumble across it accidentally; get yourself a baby! What the?! Ok, I know it’s a nonconventional approach but allow me to elaborate. The jo...

In my quest for both some engaging blog material and a desire to get up to speed with everything new in the latest generation VS and .NET fast, following is an overview of 25 illustrated examples of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. It’s not seriously in depth, just enough to understand what’s new and where you can go to get the serious details. Background Rather than churning out another ubiquitous “Hello World” app, I’ve used an existing ASP.NET 3.5 project which has been my test bed for pretty...

I’m a big fan of Subversion. As far as source control management products go I find it pretty intuitive and very easy for people to get to grips with regardless of their degree of technical competence. The autonomy it has from the prime time technology stacks gives it broad appeal and the fact that it’s freely available is surely a significant part of why it’s so popular today. If you’re looking for pure source control management, it’s hard to go past SVN. Following is the process I recently we...

The final catalyst for me eventually taking the leap into the blogosphere came from an unexpected source. It was actually my own response to a Stack Overflow Question [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1352597/continue-education-or-put-myself-out-there/1353125#1353125] where I’d suggested that one of the best ways to make yourself more marketable as a software developer is to have an active online profile. I don’t necessarily mean to try and achieve semi celebrity status like Scott Guthrie [ht...