Well, those that know me will have already heard the news but if not then here goes.
As of today the company I work for has ceased trading and I have been made redundant effective immediately. Exactly what my future holds is still uncertain although I do have some very interesting opportunities which will hopefully allow me to continue where I left off.
I have spent 5 years working for the company and seen it grow from a small 2 man operation into a thriving marketing agency and feel I played my part in that and this feels like a big kick in the teeth. There is a lot more I could say about that but this is not the time or place for that. So instead I would like to take the chance to thank everyone who has made the last 5 years so special both colleagues and clients. Special thanks must go to James (who saw my potential and gave me a chance), Mark, Charlotte, Steve, Helen and Sarah.
So long and thanks for all the fish (or should I say coffee) :(
Monday, 27 June 2011
Friday, 24 June 2011
My Top 5 Development Related Apps
Inspired by this Tweet by @netmag from last week, here are the 5 software programs I use for work which I couldn't live without.
So what do you think? Disagree or have I missed any biggies? Would be interested to know what everyone else thinks.
- Resharper Visual Studio Plugin - I simply could not code in Visual Studio without it, adds all the extra bits that Microsoft forgot about.
- LLBLGen Pro - writing database access code by hand is dull and boring, that is just a fact. This marvellous O/R Mapper takes the pain out of it.
- Google Chrome - to quote Apple "It Just Works". Fast, lightweight and with a well oiled JavaScript rendering engine make it the best browser out there at the moment.
- Spotify - OK, not strictly work related but would struggle to get through a whole work week without it. Despite a few gaps in the catalogue (no AC/DC or Metallica) it is pretty much awesome and all for a £5 month.
- Leech FTP - this may be a controversial one with the likes of FileZilla and various others out there. My problem with most of those is that they overcomplicate things - FTP is not a complicated thing and the fact that Leech is no longer being developed means it will continue to remain simple.
So what do you think? Disagree or have I missed any biggies? Would be interested to know what everyone else thinks.
Thursday, 23 June 2011
Telerik, IE9 and a Schoolboy error
As part of a project I am working on I have been using the rather fantastic Telerik ASP.NET Ajax controls and despite the documentation being a little bit lacking have managed to get things working very smoothly.
But today I noticed a JavaScript error appearing on one of my pages which seemed to relate directly to the Telerik controls (Unable to set value of the property 'control': object is null or undefined) - I did a search on the forums and found several people with the same problem such as this one but none of the solutions seemed to apply in my case.
Just as a side note the JavaScript error was picked up by one of my colleagues and I struggled to reproduce the problem on my own machine - I eventually tracked the problem down to IE9 and the fact it now hides the error icon in the status bar so I never caught it myself, kudos to Microsoft for that little gem and wasting a load of my time.
Anyway, I decided the best way to solve the problem was just to keep deleting things from the page until the error went away which eventually led me to a bunch of controls which I had commented out. And here is where I have to admit that I made a bit of a schoolboy error because I had used a standard HTML comment <!-- --> which meant that ASP.NET still rendered the control and its JavaScript but hides the HTML and hence generates the rather cryptic error message. So Lesson learnt, when commenting out controls use <%-- --%> instead.
But today I noticed a JavaScript error appearing on one of my pages which seemed to relate directly to the Telerik controls (Unable to set value of the property 'control': object is null or undefined) - I did a search on the forums and found several people with the same problem such as this one but none of the solutions seemed to apply in my case.
Just as a side note the JavaScript error was picked up by one of my colleagues and I struggled to reproduce the problem on my own machine - I eventually tracked the problem down to IE9 and the fact it now hides the error icon in the status bar so I never caught it myself, kudos to Microsoft for that little gem and wasting a load of my time.
Anyway, I decided the best way to solve the problem was just to keep deleting things from the page until the error went away which eventually led me to a bunch of controls which I had commented out. And here is where I have to admit that I made a bit of a schoolboy error because I had used a standard HTML comment <!-- --> which meant that ASP.NET still rendered the control and its JavaScript but hides the HTML and hence generates the rather cryptic error message. So Lesson learnt, when commenting out controls use <%-- --%> instead.
And So It Begins...
First - a plea; this is the first time I have ever really blogged before so please be patient with me.
OK, now that is out of the way I will introduce myself - my name is Kevin and I am a 30 year old Web Developer based in the UK. I specialise in ASP.NET with over 6 years experience. I work for a small marketing agency based in a very posh area of Knutsford, Cheshire.
This blog is mainly to document some of the programming challenges I face daily in the hope that it may help other people with the same problem but I will also be posting personal articles as well as interesting sites from around the web.
I doubt anyone will be reading this at the moment anyway but if you are (are you really that bored?) then please send me nice comments :)
As a special treat for my first post here is a HTML5 game which should keep you busy for a while http://www.flaminglunchbox.net/curvy
Over and out
Kevin
OK, now that is out of the way I will introduce myself - my name is Kevin and I am a 30 year old Web Developer based in the UK. I specialise in ASP.NET with over 6 years experience. I work for a small marketing agency based in a very posh area of Knutsford, Cheshire.
This blog is mainly to document some of the programming challenges I face daily in the hope that it may help other people with the same problem but I will also be posting personal articles as well as interesting sites from around the web.
I doubt anyone will be reading this at the moment anyway but if you are (are you really that bored?) then please send me nice comments :)
As a special treat for my first post here is a HTML5 game which should keep you busy for a while http://www.flaminglunchbox.net/curvy
Over and out
Kevin
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