Writing quality software for clients is difficult at the best of times. Planning a timeline, planning resources and making sure you have the skills to complete the job, along with a myriad of other things to worry about – If your company is a solution provider, not an integrator (a digital agency) you also have to factor in the end result, and expected return that the client will even get out of the project (the end game) before you even start. So the question is, with so many things that require careful planning, why do software development timelines always appear to carry less weight with management than projects in other mediums?

I have been written a number of posts recently taking a look at Microsoft SQL and some items of it's more obtuse feature set – Microsoft SQL CLR support is one of these hidden gems. Whether you want to add SHA256 hashing to SQL or add managed code features to your database functions (MSMQ support?) this will get you there.

So It’s been about a year or so since I've written any Facebook applications for clients, and in that time quite a lot has changed in the space. There are quite a list of available libraries you can use to write Facebook applications in .Net with, so it can be sometime daunting to pick one as your favourite. This can be further complicated by the fact that for a lot of people, when they first go to write a Facebook application some of the jargon thrown around can be confusing when you know nothing about the Facebook API – what approach should you take? does having ASP.Net MVC or Silverlight support make the library a good one?

Microsoft was good to the people of interwebs land when they released IIS 7.5; The added functionality that allows you to map wildcard SSL certificates to multiple websites on a single IP really helps keep the need for IP address wastage down when running multiple SSL sites on multiple child sub domains. There a slight road block you need to look out for and that is the GUI itself.

So in today's day and age stored procedures are not a new thing at all. DotNet Developers seem to put themselves in one of two camps, those that think they are awesome and use them for everything, and those that think they only have certain times when they are needed and only use them when the absolute need arises (these days, not regularly).

In the modern world we live in with Web Services, RPC calls and the like, SQL server has had a lot of work on its hands trying to keep its followers from leaving to newer ways to store data such as document databases. Microsoft SQL server is like an old friend that developers have either come to love or hate – but like old friends, they may have been keeping some secrets. One of these hidden gems appears in the shape of native XML output support for queries.

So tomorrow is my last day at Alpha Salmon. I am moving on to new and exciting things, at a new workplace, and felt a blog post was in order. The decision to leave was not an easy one. I enjoy my work and all of the pluses it delivers such as boozy Friday afternoons at the work bar (they have an open bar in the building – win). I walk to work, so adding a commute will drastically change my daily life/amount of sleep as well. I have stayed here long enough that i am starting to become a grey hair member of the staff. Management has given me great flexibility to implement change, and i really enjoy(ed) the opportunities they gave me.

Over the last few days I've had the pleasure (2… 3… noot) of installing Blackberry Enterprise Server on our new (6 months old) Exchange 2010 setup at work. Setting up the permissions using the Exchange Command Shell lead me to a problem that drove me absolutely insane. When applying Send-As permissions using the exchange command shell commands that RIM themselves have in their documentation, i hit a brick wall.

A lot of great open source projects have come along to help developers who, like me, have to offer backwards support to Internet Explorer 6 through to 8. CSS3 Pie is a pretty cool new project by Jason Johnston from 321 Creative. Want to support a lot of the great new CSS3 additions in Internet Explorer? Looks like there’s an alternative.

Team Foundation Server has some notoriety when it comes to administering security. When it comes to giving a client or remote user access to enter work items and bugs only, wading through the quagmire of MSDN can make it seem impossible. I’ll show you a quick direct path to giving a client remote access.