The Deep Search for ultimate Control

Having just come back to working with Webforms (instead of the glorious MVC) I found myself using the good old
FindControl method in search of an elusive control.

It turns out that FindControl can only find controls that are in the current container. I needed some way to deep search the page and find the specific control I needed.

Enter FindDeepControl:

… more to come soon !

1000 Reputation on StackOverflow

Today I hit the 1000 reputation points mark on StackOverflow.

Reputation points are given by other users of StackOverflow for giving good answers to other peoples questions and for asking good questions yourself.

I’m a big fan of peer review and reaching the 1000 reputation points mark is a real milestone in my own quest to help other programmers and to ask good questions.

Here’s to the next 1000 !

Shower? That’ll be £30 please!

When was the last time you paid your hard earned money to take a shower? (do we even call it ‘taking’ a shower in this country? Should I say ‘have’ a shower?)

The journey to and from work has been part and parcel of working away from home since the beginning of mankind.

Ever since my second real job, I’ve taken either public transport or driven. I think there comes a time in every persons life when they realise they’re not quite as fit as they’d like to be and for me, that time is now.

As a result of this I made a decision to start cycling to work. Boris would be proud!

I set out and bought myself a new bicycle, helmet, bike lock, new snap proof pedals (since the plastic ones on the bike snapped off after I ‘tested’ the bike at the weekend) and various bits and bobs including a pump and mudguard (this got very expensive, very quickly!).

My route to work takes me through some lovely parts of London including Putney, Wimbledon, and across the River Thames over a distance of 8.9 miles.

18 miles a day, that’s bound to help increase my fitness and keep the old endorphins flowing. Right?

The only problem is, there are no showering facilities at work! I hear your cries, agast with the anguish of having to sit at work all day smelling like a 4 day dead hedgehog lying by the side of a summers road during a heat wave. So what’s a guy to do?

My first thought was that a quick wash in the sink would suffice. This may indeed be the answer and I’ve certainly not ruled it out.

I had this conversation with another potential cyclist at work and I presented my ideas of the sink wash to an unenthusiastic “yeah, you could do that, I guess”.

My second idea involved scouting out other local businesses and finding one with showering facilities. I figured I could just walk into an office each day, greet them with the usual “Good morning, nice to see you again, love what you’ve done with your hair today”, and proceed to shower and scoot.

It was at this point I was presented with a third option by my new cycling friend. “Why don’t we join the gym over the road so we can use their showers? It’s only £30 a month so you’d only have to cycle 10 days each month to have earned that back in saved transport costs.”

I like the idea of being able to have a nice warm shower each morning after a lengthy ride to work, but £30 a month to shower? That seems just a little backwards to me.

Instantly I responded with “What a great idea! Do you think we can convince them to let us just use the showers for free?”. Those who know me wont be surprised that this was my initial reaction. “Payment you say? How about a lifetimes free trial? yes? yes?”.

Usually when I sugest anything that involves negotiating or being a bit cheeky I’m met with groans and smug looks that sugest “You sunny, don’t know the system like the rest of us do, such innocence”. Yes, indeed.

So what would you do in this situation? Would you pay £30 a month to shower? Try to negotiate a fair rate to use the gym’s showers in the morning? Infiltrate other local businesses? or go for the old strip wash in the sink?

Answers on a postcard…(By ‘answers’ I mean comments and by ‘postcard’ i mean in the little box below).

A new project begins – StatPro

Good news! Good for me anyway. During my recent search for a new project and team to work with, I’ve been invited to join the team at StatPro in Wimbledon, working as their SaaS Web Developer.

The role looks very interesting and I’ve been told I’ll be working on a new greenfield project using ASP.NET MVC (C# 3.5+).

Here’s a little bit about StatPro from their website:

StatPro is a leading provider of portfolio analytics and data solutions for the global asset management industry. Having grown from a one-product company StatPro now offers our clients eight core products including data and enterprise reporting solutions. This range of products enables StatPro to provide a unique integrated product offering with a strong competitive advantage.

One of the most important things to me in any company I work with is their passion and desire to firstly, allow the business and it’s staff run in an adaptive and progressive manner, and secondly for them to embrace new technologies as they arise.

StatPro are one of the first companies I’ve seen to be commercially utilising ASP.NET MVC and as someone passionate about new technology and innovation, this really hits my hot buttons. The company have also embraced many of the agile processes and are actively bringing in more Unit Testing and TDD methodologies. Working in iterative cycles also ticks at least one of the boxes and having worked this way before, it comes as a real pleasure to be involved with a company who know what works well.

Finding out what works from both the companies perspective (what value is offered to the business) and also the staff’s perspective (what can I realistically achieve in any given period of time) is a great place to start from and keeps the whole inner workings of the development and business processes transparent.

Throughout my time at StatPro I’ll be blogging about my continued learning’s of ASP.NET MVC, C# 3.5, Web Development and general musings into the life of the nine-to-five London worker.

Luckily I’ll be able to cycle to work from now on and avoid the tube which will be a nice change and might even help get me back to being fit once again. Hey, who knows, perhaps soon I’ll be blogging about keeping trim and attending lunch time yoga classes (It’s a nice idea huh? :p ).

Twitter 101 – Open for business

Over the past couple of years we’ve seen a huge uptake in people using Twitter. Now the company has decided to release a new page on their website called Twitter 101 for Business – A Special Guide.

The aim of the new information seems to be to educate businesses on how Twitter can work for them. This is probably a good thing since most people I talk to about Twitter, who don’t use it, usually reply with “I just don’t get it. Why would anyone care what I’m doing?” and it’s a fair point too.

Now there’s a place business owners can go to find out exactly what Twitter is for and why people might care. All in all I think Twitter have made a good decision doing this. Let’s see how it affects the way more businesses do business in the future.

Ever wondered what the Twitter Admin looks like?

I know I have…

French Blog NoWhereElse is claiming that the Twitter admin panel was recently hacked and they’ve got a bunch of screenshots as proof. I first read about this at Mashable.com where they’re showing just a few of the screenshots.

I’ve decided (for now and for as long as too many people don’t complain) to post all of the screenshots here including the ones many people aren’t willing to show at this time.

The screenshots could be fakes and noone at Twitter has yet confirmed if these are indeed the real McCoy but fake or real, they’re certainly very interesting. If they are real they offer a unique peek at the inside workings of the Twitter mothership as never-seen-before. Enjoy…

[View with PicLens]

Algorithmic Thinking

al⋅go⋅rithm [al-guh-rith-uhm]

–noun
a set of rules for solving a problem in a finite number of steps, as for finding the greatest common divisor.

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.

One of the greatest things I’ve found about the work I do is that concepts from one field often tend to automatically map over to work I do in other contexts. When I first learned about Object Orientated Programming, I started to see the world in terms of objects. I’d look at the TV and think “hmm, the TV has XY and Z properties and these methods exist for doing those things and if event q happens, method k gets fired”.

These things tend to mellow out after a short period of time but it’s hard to learn anything without it becoming part of what you do and how you operate. The more things you learn the more choices you have about what behaviours you exhibit and this leads me to the idea of Algorithmic Thinking.

As programmers, we all know about algorithms and their importance in software engineering but what about in the rest of the world. Since the idea of algorithms isn’t one from programming but one from mathematics, and mathematics being the way in which we model the world around us, it makes sense for us to take our knowledge of algorithms and to begin thinking about other things in a similar way.

One of the great things I love about algorithms is that they’re implementation neutral. That is, the algorithm defines the finite series of steps to follow to get result x but it doesn’t tell you how you should implement those steps. That’s part of being creative and artistic and the more of each of those you are, the more exciting it becomes to figure out new ways of doing lots of different things.

Every now and then I spend a little bit of time thinking completely algorithmically so that I can more easily build up that part of my brain that deals with problem solving. If I have the cook dinner, what algorithm am I going to use? Maybe I’ll come up with three or four different ones and then pick that one that best suits what I want.

Then I get to implement that algorithm and figure out different ways I’m going to go about that. If step one is to get the ingredients out of ther cupboard how am I going to implement that behaviour? Will I simply walk up and get them out? Maybe I’ll climb up a small step ladder to reach? Perhaps I’m going to put some music on and dance my way over to the kitchen? The beauty in this part is that you get to be as creative as you can imagine.

I tend to think of things in terms of puzzles, whether it’s cooking a meal, writing a computer program or simply figuring out what’s going to come next in a movie. Part of my love for being on this planet is our ability as humans to solve puzzles and problems and to always be creating new ways of doing things.

I’m interested in what kinds of fun algorithms people can come up with for every day tasks. Whatcha got?

Microsoft ASP.NET MVC

Microsoft ASP.NET MVC is the latest technology from Microsoft that has been built on top of the ASP.NET 3.5 framework.

Microsoft Says:

ASP.NET MVC enables you to build Model View Controller (MVC) applications by using the ASP.NET framework. ASP.NET MVC is an alternative, not a replacement, for ASP.NET Web Forms that offers the following benefits:

• Clear separation of concerns
• Testability – support for Test-Driven Development
• Fine-grained control over HTML and JavaScript
• Intuitive URLs

Source: http://www.asp.net/mvc/

There’s a lot to be said about ASP.NET MVC and so far, I’m only just scratching the surface of what’s possible with this new technology.

Read the rest of this entry »

User Stories

User stories are an integral part of Agile but how come?

When I was first introduced to the idea of using user stories in a commercial environment I didn’t really know what they were. I’d seen some other people using them and noticed that they seemed to be a breakdown of what was needed for a given system and then the developers would pick up one story at a time and work on it. “Marvelous!” I thought, but what’s the point?

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Mixed Language Artist – MLA

In the martial arts world, the idea of Mixed Martial Arts is something that’s been around for hundreds of years. The past ten years has seen a huge uptake in the concept with many more martial artists now choosing the mixed martial arts over their former singular and less eclectic predecessors. This increase in interest has been helped with televised competitions such as UFC.

The main reason for this is that each art has it’s own strengths and weaknesses. Some arts are good for distance fighting, some for close range, some are better than others at ground work and some have better defensive maneuvers than others.

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