For a while now I have been at the door of describing myself as a developer, but I think I have finally gone through that door. It is all a state of mind, its not about having x amount of knowledge, its just about saying “Yeah, I’m a developer now.” One thing that pushed me through that door, was an application form...

User Groups and F#

For a while I have been threatening to try a user group. Well this week I went to my first meeting. The user group I went to is called Leeds Sharp who are celebrating their third birthday, happy birthday guys and thanks for the cake. The talk was all about F#. I know nothing about F# other than it is in visual studio....

Visual Studio

I recently replaced my installation of Visual Studio 2013 with Visual Studio 2015 RC. I like the new version, I am not a Visual Studio expert so it will probably take me a while to find all the good stuff but here are some initial thoughts. Being as my MSDN subscription is still valid I have installed the professional...

Overflow

Today I encountered a new error. Run-time error ‘6’: Overflow doesn’t really tell me much. The error was occurring in the Access ADP front-end of our main database. It was only occurring for one particular Id number which was really confusing me. First thing I tried was to remove the most recent changes I had made,...

Trying windows 10

My laptop has been getting a bit cluttered up with stuff so this weekend I gave it a reset. As I am using windows 8 this was much easier than doing a format reinstall which I have done many times with previous OSes. Open settings and select recovery and after about 4 hours everything was back to factory settings. I...

As A Service

In Cloud Computing there are a lot of terms that end aas or As a Service. Most of these I hadn’t heard of until I started writing this list. Any service that is delivered over the internet instead of hosted locally on your network or PC could in theory be described as an As a Service. PaaS Platform As a Service This is...

Top 25 Star Trek Characters

I am going to take a break this week from talking about technology to talk about Star Trek. I have just listened to a podcast where they consider this list of great Star Trek Characters. I am now going to try and come up with my own top 25 characters. Here we go. Spock. My number one star trek character is Spock....

Rubber Duck is a process in development where you talk through an issue with an inanimate object such as a Rubber Duck. It gets its name from the book The Pragmatic Programmer where it was first used. I am the only programmer where I work and often I find myself with a question that I can’t find the answer to. I do...

I might actually like SQL Server

How did this happen I think I may actually like SQL Server now? I remember a few years back when I used to grumble about writing a SQL query that included a JOIN. For some reason back then I could never get my head around JOINs. Today is a totally different story. I wrote a deployment script that did the following:...

I have been recently working on a database that hasn’t been designed but has been hacked together by lots of people over the years. It started life as an Microsoft Access database created by my director to keep track of all the projects that our company does. It was not much more than one table listing everything. At...