Damon Armstrong learned the hard way that not having a clearly defined project scope or contract can come back to bite the contracting programmer. Here, he offers his tips and insights on how to avoid similar conflict with your own contracts and clients.… Read more
Phil Factor’s recent blog on The Joy of IT Meetings contains a lot of good advice, but if you really want your meetings to be productive, I can only suggest you adopt the Simple-Talk approach. All you need are some good people, a traditional local hostelry, some lovingly-brewed real ale and about 2 hours. Here’s … Read more
A band of muscly Essex men take on the geeky IT department in a basketball match - if you think the victor of this challenge sounds like a foregone conclusion, read on...… Read more
Author and SQL Server development manager, Kirk Haselden, talks about SSIS, gruelling interviews on an empty stomach, and his role at Microsoft.… Read more
As we approach the 10-year anniversary of XML, Jim Fuller provides a personal retrospective, focussing on how XML has been and will be used with the RDBMS.… Read more
In a recent blog, Todd Bishop highlighted the fact that Microsoft had hired “more than 10,000 people worldwide in the fiscal year ended June 30, bringing the total to 71,553 (… the biggest annual increase in the company’s history)”. Subsequently, the anonymous Mini-Microsoft blogger duly wondered what exactly these 10K people actually did AT Microsoft – … Read more
During the recent World Cup a couple of my friends in the US sent me this clip from an English newspaper claiming (boasting, more like) that English fans were “drinking Germany dry”: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=17302491&method=full&siteid=94762&headline=beer-we-go–name_page.html English people seem to have this strange, unfounded reputation as large beer drinkers. The reality is, in fact, that most of us … Read more
As part of an occasional series on odd places to get good beer, on Friday last week Red Gate sent me on a fact-finding mission to Cornwall to investigate “The Watering Hole” pub at Perranporth. Now this pub is actually on the beach – not near it, or overlooking it, but actually on it. The … Read more
I have always felt rather second-rate as an IT pundit as I have yet to introduce my own TLA (Three-letter Acronym ) into the IT industry. I would therefore like to suggest a new branch of IT: solving IT problems by Antiquarian Research in Technology. Or ART, to us aficionados.… Read more
If I had a penny for every person who said "usability is just common sense", I'd have a pretty reasonable stack of pennies - maybe 30 or so. Clearly I'm not going to be able to retire on this, but at least it demonstrates that many people have misconceptions about how usable interfaces are designed. … Read more
In the press room, Mary Jo Foley (from Microsoft Watch) was expounding on how hard it was to predict which articles would really take off and which would bomb. She would write controversial pieces on the latest hot topics, such as SharePoint, expecting a whirlwind response and getting barely a breeze. She then punts out … Read more
I met a lot of good people today at Tech Ed yesterday. I know that may seem a rather trite thing to say, but I just can’t come up with a better way to summarize my day. In the morning, I had a nice chat with Bob Beauchemin, whose written work I admire a lot, … Read more
As an Englishman I’m well used to the experience of leaving some gloriously sun-kissed location and returning home to greyness and drizzle. But rarely the opposite. However, so it was on Friday as we swapped a sweltering, blue-skied London for the rain-drenched streets of Boston. Our hotel (the Onyx) is one of those seemingly ubiquitous … Read more
Tech Ed in Boston is just around the corner and the Red Gate offices are a feverish hive of activity (carefully coordinated around numerous swag boxes). I will be at the event, trying to dig out the latest news and views and hopefully, scratching a little beneath the shiny surface of the MS hype machine. … Read more
How do you keep your skills current? How will you prepare yourself for what you will be doing 5 years from now? In this article, part III of the series, I discuss books and the role they can play in keeping the developer up to date.… Read more
There is a line in the book “London Fields” where the main character is asked why he only drinks lager when playing darts and not real ale. His answer is (I’m paraphrasing and omitting a lot of swear words — this is Martin Amis after all): “It’s kegged. You know what you are getting every … Read more
