This article is about what I have had to do, as someone with a Microsoft technologies background, to get setup to write an iPhone app. I ended up getting my Samsung NC10 netbook to dual boot Windows 7 and MacOS X Snow Leopard so I could achieve it.

The first problem that I needed to solve was the development More...

This article is about my experience at LeWeb and the range of emotions I felt there as an entrepreneur who has invested all the money I have into my own Internet start-up which is yet to make a profit. There were a lot of things that were sweet but also something that left me with a slight bitter taste. I started with high hopes, then taking the rose tinted glasses off and having doubts about the wisdom of what I’m doing, feeling a bit let down until my spirit was re-invigorated by a raw and inspirational talk by one of the LeWeb speakers.

It was a big week for my company’s websites. My whole team have worked really hard over the last year to create them and we had the honour to be invited by PayPal to demonstrate our http://www.tcbooker.com website, a market place for training courses in the UK, which uses PayPal’s new Adaptive Payments API on their stand at LeWeb..(we’re using Chained Payments if anyone is interested!).

The first thing to mention is how many big name personalities and companies there were at the event. It was opened with a ‘Fireside chat’ with Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter. Here is a guy who’s service is currently changing the world and is what every aspiring tech entrepreneur wants to be. He talked about how he created the first version of Twitter back in 2000 using an email dropbox to get messages More...

I signed up for this Paypal event 5 weeks ago when I first saw it on Twitter - CharityHack. I thought it was going to be a couple of days of workshops where Paypal show developers how to use their new Adaptive Payments API…. how wrong was I!

The penny only dropped More...

One thing that I have had to do over the last year is to hire people to help build by websites. Anyone that has been in the hiring position will know the pain that follows placing an advert… the deluge of CV’s which are generally very poor quality. I was discussing recently with some colleagues the filtering technique for applicants I use which has been very successful for me. It was pointed out to me that I was essentially implementing a CAPTCHA system – but in the physical rather than virtual world.

The idea is More...

It was 2 weeks ago now but I had the privilege of giving a 20 minute talk at the £5 App event in Brighton.

My slide deck of the talk will be at the bottom of this post for download if anyone is interested. The event was recorded by Ian Ozsvald and posted on his blog as well as the £5 App website.

I talked about quitting my job and hiring a small team to help develop the websites I had created into something with more quality and could be a commercial success. I wish I had had a little more time as I didn’t get do demo any of the functionality but it was great to be able to talk about them! The websites are http://www.skillbook.co.uk http://www.safetytrainingnetwork.co.uk and http://www.trainingcoursebooker.com .

On reflection there was one point which I wish I had made. I have spent most of my career working for large companies which we can call ‘The Man’ and at the talk I was congratulated for ditching ‘The Man’ and doing my own thing. However this implies that working for ‘The Man’ is a bad thing and this is where I wish I had made the following point.

In my opinion More...

I have just had one of those weeks where nothing seems to be simple, now finally after countless hours of head scratching I think I have a solution to a problem that has dogged me for over a month now.

I am using an asp:ListView on the Online File Store of my http://www.skillbook.co.uk website (check it out, it’s free to sign up to!!). I decided to explicitly bind my data to the control rather than use the <%# Bind(“”) %> syntax for reasons that are not important. During testing we had reports that when saving an edit of the first item in a page an exception was being thrown the good old ‘object reference is not equal to an object’.

Back on the Dev environment I could not reproduce it. On the internal server I could not reproduce it. On the live server it was falling over like my 5 week old baby trying to stand when I clicked save.

I have found other people with this problem:

http://forums.asp.net/p/1275744/2424258.aspx#2424258

http://www.ureader.com/msg/14254035.aspx

but no solution. With the pressure on to fix this in the live environment I have finally found a solution that seems to work, and I’m afraid that it is phugly code.

With the listView.EditItem == null the answer for me was just to get the item out of the ListView using the index that is sent through as part of the ListViewUpdateEventArgs.

So instead of:

It becomes:

I really hope this helps some people out there!

This article goes through a simple api I have created and released to enable people to integrate postcode lookup features in their own applications. In a nutshell people give me the ids and postcodes of their items, which I store. Then these id’s can be searched for by providing a postcode and a radius.

I created this service after having had a couple of enquires to my business about people wanting to have the postcode lookup feature I have got on my on my www.safetytrainingnetwork.co.uk and www.trainingcoursebooker.com websites in their software.

I have just extended the service to us the free http://www.freethepostcode.org/ service which I think is a great idea and I hope it continues to grow as it removes the licencing headaches I was having by using Multimap. My service can still use Multimap for the Geolocation data as long as the user has a valid Multimap account (contact me if you need more details).

More...

I had a very busy and interesting day yesterday. There was an event by Amazon, drinks with like minded techies and finished off we a good dose of comedy!

First stop was an event put on by Amazon at the British More...

I have been using Url re-writing on my new website www.trainingcoursebooker.com to try and make friendly, human readable urls which are good for both people and search engines. There is a very subtle problem which I finally found and more importantly found a solution to.

Everything works great in testing and in live. However my email inbox was suddenly filled with notifications of errors on the site (I’ve written code that notifies me of all errors via email so I don’t have to check event logs). The important part of the exception message is:

Message: Cannot use a leading .. to exit above the top directory.

After a google around most of the answers seemed to be in the fact I would be using some kind of ../../../ notation to reference a stylesheet or something. After going through all my code multiple times I was sure it wasn’t that. I could not reproduce the errors and was very puzzled.More...

I have managed to arrange Ian Crowther, an ex-colleague from Avanade, to come and do a brown bag session for me and my employees this Saturday 14th March at my office near Haslemere in the UK.

Ian has been working a lot with Microsoft’s MVC.net and Yahoo UI recently. He is going to give a presentation and then run a practical coding workshop on Microsoft’s MVC.net and Yahoo UI showing how to combine them to More...