theusualsuspect.com

As I have stated before a lot of things have been changing at my place of work. We have recently stopped using Visual Source Safe and moved everything over to Subversion.

(more…)

So I finally bit the bullet and shelled out for a brand spanking new laptop and to break the mould I got a MacBook. Although I have worked on Macs in the past I was surprised how much I’ve been blown away by the experience.

(more…)

At the marketing agency I work for we have just recently finished a medium sized project which required the use of Postcode distance calculating. We looked at several solutions including PostCodeAnywhere, which I have used in the past for other projects, but our concern was the cost of the postcode data. Even obtaining the data directly from the Royal Mail was very expensive. Costs looked likely to be around £2,000 for a setup fee and then ongoing yearly costs of around £500. As the project wasn’t a guaranteed success for the client we wanted to keep the costs down for them.

(more…)

Ok, firstly I’d like to apologise for not blogging for a while, but I have a million and one excuses, including trying to sell my house. Less said about the state of the UK property market the better.

Anyway since my last blog, I’ve been doing a lot of reading. Some of this includes tips on general web stuff such as search engine optimisation. However, my biggest area of reading has been into Agile web development, specifically in .Net. Has it been a life changing experience? No, but it certainly has made a big difference to my coding and how I organise things within projects. I have discovered sites such as:

• CodeBetter.Com which is an endless source of information about the latest coding practices.
• .Net Rocks! a weekly Internet audio talk show for .NET Developers
• dnrTV a great visual source for learning new .Net stuff

I have moved away from reading so many web standards blogs and got my head down to catch up with .Net. I figured that the W3C move so slowly on everything they do I can easily jump out of reading those blogs for quite some time and jump back in at a later date.

So in terms of my blog I intend to start writing articles on my learning of the model / view / presenter architecture and other agile based ideas.