While working on soon-to-be-released projects there has often been a need to make a staging/testing website publicly accessible for client testing. This is a slippery slope if search engine spiders get in and index your site before the rest of the world is meant to see it (it happens more than you’d like to think) – If it happens to be a website you are building for something that the rest of the world shouldn’t see yet such as a product/service launch, having it leak too early can often make or break you. They have a word that describes this very fear of spiders  – it’s called Arachnophobia.

I’ve been lucky enough to have access to a brand new Surface 2.0 (Samsung SUR40) recently, and wanted to try my hand at developing for the platform. As with most things, the easiest way to learn something is to set yourself up with a little project – I’m going to build a very simple Image “Attractor” to start. This will allow you to move, resize and rotate images and videos on the screen of the device. The Surface development community appears to be a little cloak and dagger, with very little information being shared; something hopefully I can positively contribute towards changing by documenting my journey.

Recently I studied and sat a Microsoft Certification for ASP.Net 4.0 and MVC. As much as some people on the web cause grief to anyone who’s interested in certifications I must state that I actually did learn a lot about other parts of the framework that day-to-day I never touch. The great thing about this experience was that while yes I did learnt about some parts of the ASP.Net framework that I’ll never touch because in the real world you wouldn’t use them, I also found I learnt about a number of other parts of the framework that I didn’t know were there and these new bits of knowledge will help me daily.

My old design lasted a long time. In fact it was the design that I launched this blog with in 2009. I loved it when I launched the site as although it wasn’t the easiest design on your reading eyes it had a certain shock/wow factor. Times change though, so i wanted a fresh look – and i wanted to claim some of that wow factor back – So if you’ve been reading for a while you’ll notice that the change has been quite dramatic. As always though, the Ninjas had to stay.

Jetbrains’ build server software TeamCity is an awesome product to get up and running with continuous integration and deployment, however with its ease of operation it leaves a few nice to have business features aside. One of these is Scheduled backup – and if there is anything that your career has probably taught you to date, it’s that when things break, having a backup is priceless.

So you’ve started sending email from your site/application, your application is doing well and you are now sending more e-mail daily. With this comes the fun of finding out that most of the email you now send ends up stuck in your customers spam filters – how did this happen? You aren’t a Nigerian scammer, and people opted-in to hear from you! At this point signing your mail may be the next step.

I have recently changed mobile service providers. The experiences I’ve had calling my old provider (Vodafone Australia) to cancel my plan and my new one (Telstra Australia) to buy their products have made it clear to me that companies that employ call centres for customer enquiries (mostly) have it completely wrong by modern customer service standards. Its seems really simple – so why does no one get it?

I first started playing around with my Kinect at home just to get a feel for what was involved in working with the SDK – I must say that I, like many of you, was amazed, and still am, at how awesomely simple and beautifully designed the API’s in the Kinect NUI framework are. A lot of people have written little Kinect demo’s showing how to create buttons and detect hand location, but I thought I’d try something different. So I set out to mimic some of the Xbox Live's interface elements in WPF.

During the big Mango update rush over the last 3 weeks i joined the rest of the Windows Phone 7 Development community and excitedly upgraded my phone from Windows Phone 7 Mango Beta to the real thing. I was so eager to upgrade right now that I did so on my work PC where I connect my phone as a Guest. This happily got me up and running (definite thanks to the WP7 team for doing such a great job of the upgrade experience). My troubles only began when i tried to synch my phone at home a couple of days later. Hopefully i can save a few of you the time i spent looking into this.

Nearly all websites these days send email and because of this the majority of developers assume that they “know how to send email from a website”. They continue under this assumption until they have a site or server of their get black listed by a Spam blacklist. Then they are forced to scratch their heads to try and figure out why this happened. Before you hit send on that email requesting to be removed from that Spam blacklist, let’s recap what you should be doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.