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...

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...

I have been using Blogengine.net for over a year now and have thought it is a great application. In this post I will tell you how I have successfully tweaked it to deliver a lightweight CMS system that I required. (I have published the source code at the bottom of this article)

At the time of writing I have successfully implemented a few websites powered completely with Blogengine.net:

http://www.seethelink.co.uk

http://www.petersfieldparish.org.uk

http://www.tonytinman.co.uk

http://www.marvelav.com

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I was told about a new feature in C# 3.0 called extension methods back in 2007 sometime by the technical architect at my old company. He explained that Microsoft had created it to enable LINQ and that it allows you extend base classes with your own functions, which is pretty cool. But what's a useful example?

Peter (my TA) said More...

Have you ever been given a spreadsheet to import into some system or other?

Have you then tried creating a simple dataloading program to read the data, run some dataloading rules against it before loading it into the correct fields on the target system.

Have you found this has caused problems in code because:

A) Everything is a string
B) It is hard to access the correct spreadsheet columns in code be because of a lot of column index numbers being used.
C) The Excel runtime must be installed on the computer running the data loading tool.

If you have shared this pain and have not found a better solution then please read on.
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