March 2011 Entries

Don’t call me, I won’t call you.

Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You – an interesting commentary of the role of the telephone in modern society. My favourite quote from the article: “You pretty much call people on the phone when you don’t understand their e-mail”. Very true.

posted @ Tuesday, March 29, 2011 10:44 PM | Feedback (0)

When flame bait marketing goes bad–aka “Why we don’t hire .NET programmers”

CEO Friday: Why we don’t hire .NET programmers – read the comments for visible proof at how flame bait marketing (and writing stupid shit on the Internet) can hurt your company’s reputation.

posted @ Monday, March 28, 2011 8:55 AM | Feedback (0)

The end for the AjaxControlToolkit?

Is it the end for the AJAX Control Toolkit? I’m not sure as I think there’s always going to be a market for simple declarative ‘pseudo ajax’ additions to the WebForms experience, no matter how bad the markup and JavaScript that they create. So while I can’t see myself using it, a version of the AjaxControlToolkit with some jQuery behind it could be an interesting thing to see. Certainly if there’s going to be sites out there using the ACT it’d be a better world if there was jQuery somewhere in the picture. Watch that space. Tags:...

posted @ Friday, March 25, 2011 6:24 PM | Feedback (0)

Where does technical debt come from

Over the past year I’ve been dealing with some technical debt across a couple of different ASP.NET applications that we recently inherited. As part of that work I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about technical debt, how to deal with it, and how to avoid it. Describing the subject of technical debt as interesting might be overstating things a little however it is a subject which is relevant to most developers at some point in their career. So when I read this article (Lotus Notes - a Double Edged Sword) it struck me as a great example of...

posted @ Monday, March 14, 2011 7:40 PM | Feedback (2) Filed Under [ Notes/Domino Web Development Miscellaneous ]

Steaming about Steam

Some friends have been hassling me to install Steam for a while now, and so earlier this week I gave it a try – however things didn’t really go smoothly, in fact they didn’t go at all. After the MSI installation finishes, Steam does a small update, restarts, and then either sticks on “Updating 0% Complete”, or throws an exception saying “To run Steam, you must first connect to the Internet”. It seems these are pretty common problems, and there’s a lot of posts out there offering many fixes for this, however none of...

posted @ Sunday, March 13, 2011 12:55 PM | Feedback (1)

Essential Developer SEO

There are many things that fall under the wide umbrella of SEO/SEM, and as a developer chances are high that you don’t really want to know about a large number of them. However like it or not if you’re creating web sites or applications there are some things you absolutely need to understand. All of what’s contained in this post is pretty simple stuff – but it’s absolutely essential. There are so many resources out there covering SEO, and yet I keep seeing sites which ignore some or all of the basic things I’m going to mention, and I...

posted @ Wednesday, March 09, 2011 10:56 PM | Feedback (2) Filed Under [ ASP.NET Web Development ]

Got Service Packs?

Looking for a little something else to compliment Windows 7/2008 SP1 which was released a couple of weeks ago? If so, here’s the perfect thing: Announcing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1. As described with the SP1 Beta post, in this release we have addressed some of the most requested features from customers of Visual Studio 2010 like better help support, IntelliTrace support for 64bit and SharePoint, and included Silverlight 4 Tools in the box. We also added unit testing support on .NET 3.5 and a new performance wizard for Silverlight, among other changes. ...

posted @ Wednesday, March 09, 2011 2:51 PM | Feedback (0)

DotNetNuke switches to C#

DotNetNuke Switches to C# – after sticking with VB for quite some time, one of the .NET world’s best known (sometimes not best loved) CMS solutions is embracing C#. I’ve been away from using DotNetNuke for a couple of years but it looks like there’s been some major improvements recently, and without wanting to go into a VB vs. C# argument this looks like yet another positive step forward for this open source project. Tags: C#

posted @ Tuesday, March 01, 2011 8:58 PM | Feedback (0)

About me

My name is Ross Hawkins and I'm a developer, consultant, business owner and writer based in Auckland, New Zealand (pictured below!). My current work revolves around ASP.NET, C#, jQuery, Ajax, SQL Server, and a mix of other Microsoft development technologies.

I also have about 15 years of experience with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and associated technologies. While Notes/Domino is no longer my primary focus I still like to dabble and keep my skills up to date.

I own and run 2 businesses - Hawkins Consulting Services, and Ignition Development.

Bethells Beach, located in sunny West Auckland, New Zealand




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Updated on April 10, 2008





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