Well it’s the 21 century, after a great deal of effort, hardship and toil, they have finally done it. What is the “it” I’m talking about? Design! Yes, after many years of the design of applications being a second class citizen Microsoft has been kind enough to upgrade us to partners in the development of software (all be it silent partners who only have a 5 per cent share of the company and only pop in for tea and biscuits occasionally). But lets face it, it’s more than any other company h ... [Read more]

We are currently working on a cool application for the Fire Protection Association (FPA) called Robust. The goal of the application is to ensure businesses are suitably prepared when an incident occurs (e.g. a Fire) Based on information gathered from the various core business activities it aims to help minimise any business impact and provide guidance on recovery options. On a side note the technology stack used for this project is also very interesting; we are using Windows Presentation ... [Read more]

Recently I've been spending a lot of time working on various SharePoint projects, none more challenging than the Citroën site launched earlier this year. I'm going to take the time to explain how we put together our web parts and server controls, particularly from the point of view of a WCM scenario where the complexity of our mark-up was significantly greater than that of a traditional "vanilla" intranet SharePoint due to the various accessibility guidelines we needed to adhere to ... [Read more]

With hindsight this technique is so similar to some other more advanced patterns I couldn't believe that I couldn't find it documented anywhere. I'd expect this is due to my using a different internal glossary to other people, nevertheless before finding this solution it looked hard, and afterward it seemed beautifully simple. Intent Send cross domain messages such as deep link requests to a named browser window. Do not interrupt existing playback of video etc. on the page. Motivation Ext ... [Read more]

I  am looking on Microsoft ESB Guidance as a great source of ideas and ready components for utilizing them in our future integration projects. For those unfamiliar with this guidance I place a brief description of it from here The Microsoft ESB Guidance provides architectural guidance, patterns, practices, and a set of BizTalk Server R2 and .NET components to simplify the development of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) on the Microsoft platform and to allow Microsoft customers to extend the ... [Read more]

As Silverlight 2 RTM is out, we have upgraded our Silverlight proof of concept application http://autopia.dotnetsolutions.ltd.uk/ from Silverlight 2 beta version. In this blog, I will try to explain my experience during the up-gradation process. As we are migrating our older code to the newer release, I first took up the nice documentation from the link http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/f/e/6fe1f43d-9d0c-4346-ad08-602df9bcb3cf/BreakingChangesBetweenBeta2andRelease.doc Once I have gon ... [Read more]

Wow - another great line up at Vista Squad this month! On the roster this time round is none other than Jason Zander... "Who?" I hear you ask... only the General Manager of Visual Studio Developer Division! He'll be popping in to talk to and answer questions from the community about Visual Studio 'Rosario', .Net 4.0 and the 2010 roadmap. After last week's anouncements at the PDC this promises to be a great insight for all .Net developers. On top of that we have HP's Jeremy Pack, ... [Read more]

"If proof was needed that Microsoft?s Azure cloud computing platform can handle gargantuan computing projects, it has been delivered, thanks to a British software developer. Wikipedia Explorer is an application developed by Windsor-based Dot Net Solutions as a proof of concept for high performance computing in the cloud. The application analyses the data within the Wikipedia user generated encyclopedia..." read more here: http://www.itpro.co.uk/607626/dot-net-analyses-wikipedi ... [Read more]