Today was the eighth annual(ish) gathering of four hundred of the Microsoft Development community for a day of free technical training. Once again it was spectacularly over subscribed – sold out faster than Glastonbury (all the places went within fifteen minutes) and with no Microsoft speakers had the usual mix of sessions, some of which [...]

This is another one of my note to my future self posts, that might be useful to somebody else, so skip past if you don’t know what WCF is…
Anyway, if you’re still here, I’ve spent the past day or so trying to track down a problem in some WCF code. Essentially the problem has been [...]

If anybody is writing .Net code that in the future I am going to have to find an error in, can they refrain from doing things like this:
try
{
…
[...]

Craig tagged me for this ages ago, so I guess I’d probably best put in my answers!
How old were you when you started programming?
I think I probably started aged around ten or eleven, with the arrival of a Sinclair Spectrum at home and a BBC Model B at school.
How did you get started in [...]

The past couple of days I’ve had one of those real head-scratching problems you get as a software developer from time to time – the classic intermittent problem that apparently has no explanation.
It came up quite by chance – we have a customer who for one reason or another massively underestimated the volume of transactions [...]

One of the regular issues you often come across with software, is the old classic of the application or web site that goes wrong when faced with a foreign system. Common problems are applications that fall over when they find they’re running on a localised install of Windows (although I’ve come across applications that hit [...]

Today was the sixth of the Developer Developer Developer events at the Microsoft Campus in Reading, and as with the previous events, I spent the day enjoying the sessions. As in previous events what I actually attended didn’t quite match up with what I thought I would attend, but the beauty of these days is [...]

We’ve just come up against a bit of a gotcha with Microsoft SQLServer 2005.
We’ve been working on a bespoke system for a customer for the past few months, and have been regularly testing against their test databases that they have been sending over, and they’ve been doing the same. Today the system was set up [...]

In amongst a lot of postings covering the recent Mix 07 event, Craig Murphy has posted a great little three minute video introducing the UK Microsoft Developer Community.
If you’re wondering what sort of stuff goes on for developers in the UK – it is a great way to get an overview.
Video: UK Developer Community

Yesterday was somewhat of a busy day – not only was it the fifth of the successful series of Developer Days at Microsoft, but we’d also got tickets for the equally successful Watercress Belle, the fine dining train that the Watercress Line preserved railway run on a number of Saturday evenings during the year.
The day [...]

I have a lot of respect for Jeff Atwood and his Coding Horror blog. He often has interesting and informed insights into software development, and generally knows what he is talking about.
Yesterday he posted an article under the heading “The Best Code is No Code At All� where, backed by comments from Wil Shipley he [...]

I’ve just been watching the latest ScobleShow videos, which include a tour, demo and interview at Smilebox, a Seattle based startup producing a flash based platform for sharing photos, videos and music with friends and family. The service seemed quite interesting, although since the design aspect won’t work on either of my main machines here [...]

Well at least it is the weekend tomorrow. As you can probably gather from my post from lunchtime, today was anything if not frustrating. After establishing that there was probably something installed on my development machine that was causing the problem, hence why the laptop was loading up the control I set about un-installing anything [...]

It seemed like a simple task – build a user control to search a database by date, so yesterday afternoon I set about putting the form together, using the Developer Express .NET controls. The form all seemed to be working fine, until I tried to reopen it in Visual Studio to tweak the layout slightly, [...]

The obvious frustration in this post from a frustrated Swiss Blogger gave me a definite feeling of relief that the five companies she has issue with (MySpace, PayPal, eBay, Amazon and Google) are all in America, so all speak a language that is similar enough to British English that I can use their default site [...]

The ScobleShow this week highlighted an interesting way for both freelance programmers to find work, and for companies to hire them through a site called ODesk. Alongside the matching services, the site also handles paying the contractors, and even allowing the software companies to check up what work their contractors are doing thanks to it’s [...]

If you’re wondering what the post title is all about, read on and all will be revealed!

Anyway, today I was at the inaugural WebDD event held at the Microsoft UK campus near Reading, having grown out of the previous Developer Developer Developer events that have been running at the same location over the past couple [...]

So this week I got my new machine set up, and have joined the prestigious ranks of three screen software developers. Having said that – it’s not quite the arrangement that Bill Gates has, in that it’s two machines driving the three.
The laptop is pretty obvious on the left, and the primary screen for my [...]

At the recent DDD4, it was announced that on 3rd February, thanks to the success of the DDD events, a spin off Web Developer Day was being planned. Registration for the WebDD opened yesterday, and I’ve already got my registration in – spaces are expected to go just as quickly as for the main DDD [...]

When I got back to work after the holiday today, there was a late Christmas present waiting – a new development PC! The machine in question is a Dell Optiplex sporting a Core 2 Duo processor, somewhat more powerful than the Latitude laptop I’ve been using up to now.
An therein lies the problem. Since the [...]