People I know and Like(?)

Quite a lot has happened in and around my little blogosphere in the last few months.

Back in February I mentioned the development blog of my friend, ex-colleague and ex-house-mate, James (Jay) Field's work for his Interactive Media MA project "Frontier".
Frontier is a massively multiplayer online game that Jay is building in Flash. The blog has gone a bit quite at the moment since he was made senior lecturer at the Hull School of Art and Design.


iheartspaceships
Nearly a year and a half ago, Ryan and Andy bought a domain name and said they were going to produce a blog. Yesterday they launched "a day early".

Ryan is a Flash Developer here at twentysix Leeds and works across many large brands on both web and AIR based Flashieness.

Andy is our UI Developer working on many of the same clients and projects but does miraculous things with JavaScript and CSS.

Hopefully they'll have some interesting thoughts soon over at iheartspaceships.com


niid.to
About a month ago James and Tom C left twentysix Leeds to persue a life of love and freedom as freelance developer and designer respectively. Amongst various freelance work that they won't tell us about they also founded niid.to, a social to do list and they have an accompanying blog over at http://niidto.blogspot.com/

26point1
Our Technical Director, Matt, used to run two blogs for the different types of nonsense he likes to spout off about. "matts 2 minute reviews" and "matts random days". Not that long ago, he merged them into one central repository of nonsense over at 26point1. Hop on over there to read about all kinds of rubbish, both technology-based and not...

Metallica

I'm off to see Metallica at Nottingham Arena tomorrow night. Can't wait!

As you'll be able to see from my Last.fm, I've been listening to a lot of it today and yesterday to get in the mood :)

Final Frontier

My old friend James only just showed me the devblog for the project he's basing his masters work around. Swing on over to http://www.frontier.lincoln.ac.uk/devblog/ and check out the crazy work he's doing.

Tidy Up

I just deleted all my old half started posts in an attempt to get some more writing done, I figured I would never finish these posts now or in the future as the moment really has passed and would seem even less applicable as time crawles on.

Well, what else am I going to do at 8am on a Saturday :(

Getting to grips with EPiServer

A week ago I was in London for a 3 day training course for EPiServer CMS.

I really enjoyed the course and learning about the CMS, it looks like EPiServer could be one of the best commercial CMS's out there.

It comes with integration packages for Visual Studio which make using the features a doddle and I'm looking forward to using it on some projects in the future.

Watch this space for any tips and tricks I pick up along my way.

The Pixel Chicken

I just found out that my mate Liz has buggered off back to Australia without somuch as a good bye! The cow!

So anyway, I thought I'd link her up... If you're reading this, you're based in Sydney and you're looking for a top class interactive designer / developer then give Liz a shout and check out her blog over at www.pixelchicken.com.

Liz, next time try saying good bye ;)

Book Review : ASP.NET 2.0 Step by Step

Just over a month ago I moved in with Smithy, during the expected packing and unpacking I came across a book that I bought close to 3 years ago when I started working at twentysix Leeds and was forced to learn .NET.

The book is "ASP.NET 2.0 Step by Step" from the Microsoft Press which and I've got to say, my initial opinion was not a good one, after getting just over half way through, I became disenchanted with and put to one side. I have since spent the last 8 months looking high and low for it, and even accusing my co-workers of losing it for me :S (sorry guys) as I found a desire to finish it.

My first attempt at reading the book was not a good one. I was coming from a solid 5 years of scripting things like Lingo, ActionScript, JavaScript and most importantly PHP; I was struggling with the structured and strict way that ASP.NET works when compared to (loose and, dare I say, sloppy) PHP pages. It also seemed a bit wordy for my liking. Some of my favourite programming books are the O'Reilly cookbook series which give you examples based around short, concise scenarios.

So, armed with my now solid 2 years of experience with C# and the .NET Framework I picked up the book again, found my old bookmark still stuck in at the end of chapter 13 and decided to have a little flick.

It just so happened that the next couple of chapters concerned subjects that have been on the agenda quite a bit recently, namely the caching of data and output within a web application.

These two chapters give a good introduction and now, with just over two years experience with C# and the .NET framework I find these chapters to be just enough to get me going on a subject. I now know how and where to look for further information on a subject from my time searching the usual places.

Having re-read the first 13 chapters I take back most of what I thought about it in the first place and can see that my original lack of enthusiasm for the book was not down to the book, but due to my inexperience with ASP.NET and all its in's and outs. I actually love this book now as it gives you insights into many of the key tools that you might use day to day in a ASP.NET web app.

Good book, get it read!