I've decided to put the AtomsFramework (the open source object/relational persistence framework) on hold for the next 6 months or so, and to then decide what to do with it after that.This has been a difficult decision, since there is a lot of pride and effort invested in the software, but in my new role as... Read more

I've had a very busy week this week, and on top of everything else I had the unfortunate experience of having one of my team resign.This guy started the day after me (about 6 weeks ago now) and was still on his probation period so at least there wasn't a lot of knowledge walking out the... Read more

It's been a very very busy week this past week (explaining the lack of posts). I've been getting some work rushed out to meet some contractual deadlines and I've had the entire development team putting in the big ones to get things done.In agile/SCRUM terms this would definitely have been a sprint! In any case, we've... Read more

I've got an issue with the rendering of pages in Firefox and Safari that I need to deal with. The pages render correctly in IE, but not in the other browsers so I needed to find a way to debug the application while testing the pages using Firefox and Safari.I found a small post on a... Read more

I just (well, last night actually) picked up my preorder for Battlefield 2. First impressions were very good and led to a very late night!The graphics are better, the gameplay better, the whole thing is better! All the good bits provided by the Desert Combat guys are there as well, along with a nice new ranking... Read more

Products with high functionality are often quite difficult to use. I'm sure you've run across this yourself. You hear of a great product that people recommend so you go out and download a demo or buy a copy from somewhere and install it on your PC.You start the program and you are immediately inundated with options... Read more

OK, So I might be a little late with the news, but Microsoft has announced the official release date for Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk 2006 to be during "the week of" November 7th. The full press release from Microsoft is here: Microsoft Sets Visual Studio, SQL Server, BizTalk Server Launch Date: Microsoft... Read more

I just came across NUnitAsp while trying to find some way to unit test ASPX pages. It seems to be a fairly comprehensive extension for NUnit and would fit right in.The only problem I've got so far is that it doesn't understand buttons that use Javascript in the submit instead of having a href reference. This... Read more

There's a nice little article over at Informit.com about adopting Extreme Programming (XP) practices in an organisation. Having gone through the adoption process in the past, I'd put myself somewhere between a toe-dipper and a cannon-baller. One of those guys that eases in up to the "cringe-point" where the water temperature makes your stomach want to... Read more

We are an ISO 9001 accredited company (so that we can deal with government bodies, etc) and there seems to be this assumption that ISO 9001 implies quality.In reality, this couldn't be further from the truth as the ISO standard is really just ensuring that the business processes of a company are documented and (importantly) followed.... Read more

At last! You can now get tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer 6 - just like you could in Firefox and Opera for the last few years. You only need the new MSN toolbar.The original story is at GeekInformed. Read more

Today I had a bit of a look around for functional testing tools for web applications. I ended up downloading the AutomatedQA TestComplete demo and trying it out.The demo is a bit limited in the extent of the testing suite that can be developed basically due to the limits on the size of the scripting, but... Read more

I'm trying to figure out what an ideal toolset is for my development team. Currently the toolset consists of VS.NET 2003, SourceSafe, the Ants code profiler and MS Virtual PC 2004.In the past I've used a whole suite of tools. VS.NET 2003, NUnit, NAnt, CruiseControl.NET, VMWare, WinCVS (and related tools), Compuware DevPartner Studio and more.With the... Read more

I started in my new role at a new company today and it's been quite a busy day! I walked into the office first thing this morning and exactly 1 minute later I was in the board room in a meeting with another company about software development. That meeting then extended into another which went until... Read more

After 9 years this is my last day with my current employer. It's been quite a ride and a really great opportunity.I've been involved in every aspect of the business, programming, design, troubleshooting, firewalls and networking, sales, marketing, trade shows, hiring and firing, starting business units, running international projects, developing new products, web site design, the... Read more

Over the last 14 years, I've done plenty of software development. I've worked on projects that have been run in a very structured manner and others that have been run in a more "flexible" manner, as well as open source projects.I've always found it very interesting to see how different projects are run, both as a... Read more

Just as I wrap up things here at work I've been thinking about our legacy VB6 code (used in a retail point of sale application).A lot of what we do in that code is quite complex and difficult to test, but it definitely needs testing. Up until now we've basically had a single person running test... Read more

So, after some time of thinking about it, I've decided to start a blog.What will I talk about here? Who knows - only time will tell.At this point in time, I'm about to wrap up my current employment (3 days to go) and move to a new company as a .NET Technical Architect. Should be very... Read more