Are you an Aussie dev? Based in Sydney or somewhere within driving/flying distance? Well, why don’t you get yourself along to DDD Sydney this year? Not only will you have a chance to hear me wax lyrical about Comet  with IIS and how async coding can help improve performance, but you’ll also get to partake of... Read more

If your code (or the rest of your team) suffers from a bad case of #region-itis then help is at hand. There’s a lovely little Visual Studio extension over at http://teamsearchapp.com/region-tool that will automatically expand #regions, and also make those #region lines much smaller and harder to read than your normal code.  No more pressing shortcuts... Read more

Today at Tech.Ed US, Jason Zander and co. went through some of what’s coming in the next versions of TFS and Visual Studio and then blogged about it shortly after. I saw some of this in action at the MVP summit earlier this year and I liked what I saw, so I’m very glad to see... Read more

Taken verbatim from an internal Readify announcement: Some weeks ago, a company in Redmond, California released a major update to their current generation of Windows called "SP1". That's ​a boring name for a product that essentially improves and cleans up windows, so we'll refer to this product as "Windex" from now on. Windex is a great... Read more

I have a lovely new 1TB external hard drive and moved all my music onto it a short while ago.  Now even though I have iPods and iPhones, for playing that music from my laptop, ITunes on Windows is pretty poor so I’ve tended to use Media Player and, more recently, Zune for that task. Now,... Read more

Found via Rob Conery’s blog – A Methodology for Better Website Development My eyes! They burn!! Make it stop!!! It’s waterfall being touted as the best way to do web development! Seriously!? Who wrote this article? Wait a second while I look….  Oh, it’s the CEO of Ektron, the makers of Ektron CMS. A product so... Read more

Back at the start of 2009 I picked up an Alienware desktop (post and pictures here) and at the time it was perfect for my needs, and how I did love it so, but as theses stories go time passed and I found myself neglecting my desktop and spending more and more time with my other... Read more

I’m doing some work with a customer at the moment that has a large and complex application written in Progress, and they are wanting to do some work to add new features to it, but want to do so via Silverlight. Now the way this application works from a UI perspective is that there is an... Read more

BYO Hardware at SunCorp To quote: “In what could prove to be a watershed moment for corporate Australia, financial services firm Suncorp will let thousands of employees use their personal computers, including Apple iPads, at work." In case it’s not obvious, the approach taken means that the devices people choose to use will just be thin... Read more

One of the nice features of some of the newer version control systems is the ability to do fast in-place branch switching. This is really useful when you are working on a web application and you have mapped an IIS virtual directory to your source folder and want to switch between branches without having to reconfigure... Read more

I’d love to hear some opinions on this so please leave comment(s) below or send me a tweet. The Problem and Some Questions In recent times in the Sydney area there have been a number of user group closures, extended breaks, sabbaticals and hiatuses.  The Sydney Mobile User Group has closed, the Sydney Business and Technology... Read more

If you like using Git for local development work but work in a team environment where TFS in use then you’ll be glad to know that the git-tfs project has been progressing well since I last posted about it. The best new feature is that now you can do a checkin direct from git-tfs instead of... Read more

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, Neo4j is a graph DB, which is great for dealing with certain types of data such as relationships between people (I find it ironic that relational databases aren’t great for this) and it’s perfect for the project I’m working on at the moment. However this... Read more

For the benefit of my twitter followers who know I have an ongoing issue with the abuse of #regions in the code I have to work with, let me take some time to explain why I dislike them so much.  In fact, let this be considered yet another step in my ongoing anti-#region campaign! (similar to... Read more

The title does give it away a little I suppose…  I’ll be presenting two sessions at the Agile Virtual Tech Summit run by the Code Project.  I’m quite honoured to be asked to present and for reference in my 2 sessions I’ll be keynoting the Agile track with a talk on Agile from a Developers Perspective,... Read more

The TFS branching guide is a very detailed run through of the various situations and scenarios under which branching can be performed and the different strategies that exist, however because the guide covers so many scenarios it’s difficult for some people to know what approach they should follow, and when they look at some of the... Read more

On one of the various mailing lists I’m part of this question came up (edited slightly) Retrospectives teach us to say to team members “I think it would be good to improve such and such for the next sprint”.  How about sensitive subjects like “one of the guys speaks in an abrupt manner” or “one of... Read more

A very quick public announcement: there’s a Nerd Dinner happening in Newcastle this Thursday, Jan 20. Details are on the NerdDinner site so if you’re in the area why not come along.  It would be great to see you there. Read more

Over recent times I’ve noticed a handful of people writing blog posts about why they are leaving .NET and the Microsoft platform to move to Ruby on Rails, Python or something other technology.  The reasons vary from person to person but the general, recurring memes seem to encompass the following: 1. Microsoft stifles innovation 2. Almost... Read more

Just a quick note letting you know that I’m running a PSM course in Perth. February 3rd & 4th, 2011.  If you’re interested in registering then head over to http://scrummastercourse.eventbrite.com/ for the details. I’d also encourage you to have a look at the details of the Scrum.org PSM course and the curriculum before registering.  And before... Read more