Yesterday saw the kick off to the Readify Developer Network - an ongoing series of free sessions for the developer community based around the latest and upcoming .NET related technologies. Think of it as a bit like tech.ed, only spread out over 6 months and with no cost to attend and no time off work required... Read more

The TableLayoutPanel that comes with .NET 2.0 is handy for doing simple HTML style layouts without the hassle of having to embed a browser control in your form and write the HTML.  The control is designed to be a lightweight container (not as powerful as the DataGridView, but more flexible in it's approach) and you can... Read more

Recently I wrote a system tray application in C# that displayed reminders for people at regular intervals. What I wanted to avoid was displaying reminders when another application was running in full screen mode.  For example if PowerPoint was showing a presentation or there was a full screen video running the last thing I wanted was... Read more

I've just received a new laptop and a new mobile phone as part of my employment with Readify, so I'm now the owner of a Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop (T7700 CPU & 4GB RAM) and a HTC Touch windows mobile device.I've now got to go through the pain of (re)installing everything I use yet again. And... Read more

Looking through some stats on the blog recently I noticed that someone had searched using this phrase: tfs cc.net versioing Note the missing N in versioNing. Now if you put the same query into Google, Live.com, Yahoo you get interesting results: First: Live.com   Now Yahoo! And finally Google So why is Google the best? All... Read more

Daniel Crowley-Wilson and Luke Drumm (a couple of my Readify colleagues) had a chat at Tech.Ed Australia 2007 about XNA game development for Virtual Tech.Ed.  This chat is now online for viewing and gives you a nice 10 minute overview of what XNA development is all about and what it means to the homebrew scene.  Hopefully... Read more

When people are first using Nullable types you'll often see code like the following: int? myInt;int result;if (myInt.HasValue)result = myInt.Value;elseresult = 0;While this code is perfectly workable, it's a bit on the verbose side of things.You can easily refactor this code using the GetValueOrDefault() method as shown here:int? myInt;int result = myInt.GetValueOrDefault();You can also specify a... Read more

Well, this is a bit sad, but I guess it's still a beta. I was just entering some code sample in a blog entry via Windows Live Writer when it removed the line breaks from all my preformatted code sections (ie the <pre> sections). Here's some screen shots of the bug in action: 1. Entering the... Read more

Recently I've been doing a bit of work from home and over the last few days my eyes have been quite tired at the end of each day, and getting particularly bad as night time descended. Here's what my work area looks like - desktop on the left (games anyone?) and the laptop on the right,... Read more

Every developer knows that they need to test their code.  Of course, just knowing that you need to test doesn't automatically mean that you will.  Rigorous testing is often skipped because developers like to, um, develop and, well, testing is yet another one of those pesky details that takes developers away from developing. After all, everyone... Read more

One of the key aspects in any agile methodology is the "inspect & adapt" process.  Making sure that teams take the time to look at what is and isn't working for them and to then make the necessary changes to try and improve things.  In Scrum this is called the Sprint Retrospective and occurs at the... Read more

You can get more information and the download link from the Live Writer Blog post. You should know that the install does take quite a while to run through, and it installs new betas for other Live products you have installed. The main new feature for Beta 3 is the ability to include images for blogger... Read more

Jeff Sutherland (co-creator of Scrum) has just posted on using Scrum in a CMMI Level 5 environment. CMMI Level anything, almost without exception, implies that an organisation is running with a waterfall process with lots of paperwork and red tape involved. If asked, most people would say that CMMI is all about increasing levels of bureaucracy... Read more

J. LeRoy (Jim Benson) has just written a fantastic post on Atomic Agility, i.e. the Social Atom and how people react to others actions, how group think evolves, and, quite interestingly, what this implies in terms of how we manage teams.  It's a very thought provoking post and well worth a read. Here's a key takeout for... Read more

In a recent post I wrote about a not-too-uncommon scenario in which a customer wants a fixed price software project to be delivered, but is still trying to figure out all those pesky details and then I asked the question on wether you would take the project on or not?  Even if it meant turning down... Read more

My last post included a picture of a clock which I wanted on the right of the text so naturally I used a css inline style to float the image to the right.  The HTML is pretty simple<IMG style="FLOAT: right" alt="clock" src="http://static.flickr.com/1115/1284040636_308c3d584d.jpg" border="0" />Nothing too dramatic about that. OK, yes, so the inline style would upset the... Read more

A good (and very large) customer calls you up: "I've got a really exciting project for you!  This is going to be huge for us and something we will talk up a lot in the media.  The exposure for you guys will be world class! What we need developed is SuperWidgetYYY. I'll explain it in detail to you later but it's... Read more

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is a great technology for adding workflow functionality to any .NET application and it includes within it a very useful forward chaining rules engine. Because the rules engine is part of WF there is an unfortunate presumption that in order to use the rules you need to be running a workflow; but... Read more

I don't quite know what to make of this one. Check out http://www.defyallchallenges.com/ see what you think and then let me know, because I'm can't quite get a grip on it. First, what's the point of it, but secondly, if VS2008 is so great then why is site built using flash and not silverlight or AJAX??Regardless,... Read more

I've resisted adding the social networking links to my site in the past because I don't want each post to look like a billboard for other sites. (Yes, I've got a little bit of google advertising going on, but that's just to pay for my lotro habit and it doesn't exactly pay the bills).Recently I'm starting... Read more