Mike Hansford

WCF RIA Services Learning Notes

2012-01-27T16:55:00.001+11:00

Why bother with RIA Services? Because Lightswitch is awesome! Out of the box I can connect to SharePoint lists (no attachment support in v.1) and to SQL Server. For anything else, I’ll need a custom WCF RIA Service. By anything else, I mean (for now) Dynamics CRM. I plan to write some more on Lightswitch later on, to document my learning as much as anything. One use case I see for Lightswitch

NBN mobile towers planning challenges

2012-01-27T11:30:00.001+11:00

Here we go again… Mobile towers and health effects, NBN style this time. Interesting that the Libs are really quiet on the topic, considering that their alternative was all wireless. http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/government-it/nbn-towers-anger-residents-and-andrew-wilkie-20120113-1py5q.html

NBN: To Wireless or Not To Wireless?

2011-05-20T13:41:00.002+10:00

I’ve been following the debate on the NBN for several years now. While the debate over whether to go with the optic fibre service currently being planned and deployed by the Labor Government or to scrap it and implement a cheaper(?) wireless based service proposed by the Liberal Party is the hot issue, there’s never been much debate that I’ve found on the reliability of a wireless network. I had

Mono project IP in trouble?

2011-05-19T20:03:00.004+10:00

This article appeared in my RSS reader today.The global Mono project team has been laid off. Miguel De Icaza and his team have formed a new company (Xamarin) to continue development. The problem for them is that their non-open source offerings - MonoTouch (Mono for iPhone / iPad) and MonoDroid (Mono for Android) (no mention of MonoMac) are owned by Novell's new owner, Attachmate. Attachmate

Blogging on Innovation and Entrepreneurship

2011-04-26T22:22:00.004+10:00

This semester I'm back at uni. I was so grateful for the break - having time to smell the roses and rediscover life. The strangest thing happened - I got married!!!I'm taking a subject called Innovation and Entrepreneurship in IT. As part of this, I'm keeping a learning stream in a blog at http://mikehansford.wordpress.com. My current post is called "The right knowledge management strategy is

System.Text.StringBuilder is better than System.String for appending for append operations but...

2011-04-20T10:20:00.008+10:00

For ages I've thought that by using a StringBuilder I could append to my strings with impunity.But now I've just come across this post from Karl Seguin. In this post he says: A StringBuilder is nothing more than a dynamic arrays for strings with some extra buffer space. When it fills up, it too must be copied to a new, larger, memory block.So this is why System.Text.StringBuilder has several

Iterative development – Agile is the late comer to this party

2011-03-24T22:27:00.001+11:00

I’m doing some pre-reading for my Innovation and Entrepreneurship in IT subject as part of my Masters in Information Systems at the moment. Our lecturer pointed us to this guy’s blog. His blog is all about innovation. A couple of posts stood out tonight. “You are solving the wrong problem” (http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/the-wrong-problem/) recounts the story of Paul MacCready who was the

The importance of having technical expertise inside the business from the start of a SharePoint implementation

2011-03-24T20:58:00.001+11:00

I’ve been working in the SharePoint space now for nearly 3 years. I was fortunate to be recruited into a SharePoint developer role by my current employer from a support and ASP.NET background. It’s something for which I’m very grateful. When I joined the company, we had an existing SharePoint 2007 installation that had been entirely specified and built using consultants. There was no internal

I hate business rules!

2011-03-15T17:58:00.001+11:00

Actually, I don’t really hate business rules, they’re one of the bits that makes programming creative, useful and challenging. But I do hate it how they’re spread all over the place. I’ve been working with a consultant to rev our codebase for our CRM installation lately and today was deployment day. As usual, we thought we had everything together. Now, I’ve been finding myself asking, “What’s

Why bother with strategy?

2010-02-03T23:29:00.001+11:00

The following is a response I posted to a blog article titled "Four Reasons Why Productive People Hate Strategic Planning." The article riled me a bit and I couldn't help but post. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Without a strategy, that is, a goal, how do you know you're not just wasting your time with make-work? The purpose of a strategy is to define the end

Photography - my new obsession

2010-01-23T13:30:00.001+11:00

I got to the end of 2009 and realised my life revolved around computers - work, study, (ahem) free time. So I needed a new hobby. Cycling - fun but not always portable. Keep fish - they were bound to die early, I don't think my landlord was really going to go for it, I'd forget to feed them or clean the tank enough, and I move home a bit too regularly. Get a pet - I rent OK...

Liberal Party leadership spill

2009-12-01T12:44:00.003+11:00

The Age reports that Tony Abbott (are you kidding?!) is the new leader of the federal Liberal Party. He one by a single vote, which apparently was informal. God help him if he ever refers to a mandate to lead the party.http://www.theage.com.au/national/abbott-wins-liberal-leadership--by-one-vote-20091201-k1va.html?autostart=1

Experimenting with IronPython

2009-10-14T17:49:00.001+11:00

I’ve been playing around with IronPython for a little while now. Until recently, not really doing much more than spelunking around the .NET Framework with the IronPython console. It’s been great for exploring unknown parts of the framework as I can largely throw away the fluff associated with instantiating objects and bothering with types. Dynamic typing is just beautiful. I’ve been engaged in a

Review of ACS Victoria Branch Forum - Cloud Computing

2009-09-25T23:57:00.001+10:00

I attended the Australian Computer Society (ACS) Victorian Branch (of which I am a member) forum this week. Paul Cooper from SMS Management and Technology presented on the topic of Cloud Computing. He spoke about how cloud computing (of which there are many, incompatible brands) can bring IT costs closer to zero and how we can gain significant processing enhancements for little green cost. He

CSIRO pursues WiFi royalties | Australian IT

2009-06-18T10:13:00.002+10:00

Good news for CSIRO, the Australian Government science and research body. For years, several technology companies (including Dell, Microsoft, Intel and HP) have tried to invalidate patents CSIRO has in the USA concerning wireless LAN (802.1x) standards.These companies have argued (unsuccessfully) that government patent belongs in the public domain.Surely, a loss for CSIRO would have had every

Use VB 9 XML Literals to parse an XML tree of unknown depth

2009-06-11T13:09:00.002+10:00

I’m in the process of building an editor interface for a Flex program we’ve written at my work. It’s my first real project using LINQ. I’ve mainly been using C# but decided to take advantage of XML Literals in VB 9.The structure of the Flex program is held in an XML file. I’ve been needing to read this XML file in such that the whole navigation structure can be held in a tree control. This is

Exploring open source - Part 2

2009-06-10T08:35:00.003+10:00

Firstly, a little about my journey with open source software. I'm by no means an "expert" (def: an unknown drip under pressure) but neither am I a total ignoramus. Intro to Linux - 2001 I came across Linux during my Diploma in IT in 2001 / 2002 where we were exposed to Red Hat 5 or 6 or thereabouts. Here is where I was introduced to the concept of open source software. It didn't last long as I

Exploring open source

2009-06-09T17:30:00.004+10:00

I’ve spent several days recently in the company of an avid open source implementer and advocate. Until recently, he featured on an Australian radio show as the resident open source (ie. Linux) geek. Anyway, I’m very firmly in the Microsoft camp so we ended up in an argument over the worth of open source software. The best thing that came of it was I decided that I really should know about the

SOLID principles are about habits

2009-04-30T19:31:00.000+10:00

Last February there was a furore in the .NET world that started when Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) went on Hanselminutes #145 (link). Joel Spolsky later went on the Stack Overflow podcast and was widely quoted as saying that quality doesn’t matter much. And the blogosphere went nuts… Remembering back to when I learned to program – I learned syntax and so on. While we were instructed to focus on

Blog post on programming language selection

2009-04-29T09:19:00.001+10:00

I liked this article. It describes one person’s process of selecting a language for a project. He briefly describes the process of choosing between Java, Ruby, PHP and Python. http://blog.dhananjaynene.com/2008/06/whyhow-i-ended-up-selecting-python-for-my-latest-project/

Oracle set to slash Sun jobs

2009-04-22T12:24:00.002+10:00

Sun seems to be a bit happier to be bought by Oracle than IBM. But probably not by much. Oracle’s said to be offering about a billion $ more than IBM so maybe that’s helping to smooth egos. But try telling that to the holders of those jobs that Oracle is tipped to cut. Oracle set to slash Sun jobs

Goodbye to Easter 2009

2009-04-14T10:13:00.001+10:00

Well, I’m back at work from the 4 day Easter break. I’m afraid it just didn’t last too long. I’m flat out with my uni study at the moment. I attended two project meetings at uni, with the first assignment due on Friday. the ping ponging between subjects is hard going, yet I’m turning in some pretty alright results. Both subjects this semester have been very engaging. Business Applications and

40 per cent of execs trust gut….

2009-04-09T10:23:00.002+10:00

I found this article today on CIO.COM. So for a quick quote from the article (italics are mine)…‘Of those respondents who said their companies still make decisions based on judgment rather than business analytics, 61 percent said it was because good data was not available, and just over half (55 percent) said their decisions relied on qualitative and subjective factors. Other reasons related to

SEEK.COM.AU RSS Feeds – Bad SEEK!

2009-03-10T17:28:00.002+11:00

I’ve been trying to adjust the display of a SEEK.COM.AU RSS feed within SharePoint 2007. FYI – SEEK is one of the top job search sites in Australia. I’ve found that while SEEK’s RSS feed for a job search “complies” with the RSS standard: ie it passes the Markup Validation Service at http://validator.w3.org, it will produce HTML markup that is non-compliant with the HTML standard when your XSLT

The uni semester starts on Wednesday night!!!

2009-03-03T21:16:00.001+11:00

Hooray!!!!!!!! I always get like this before the semester starts. I'm chomping at the bit and ready to go. As the semester drags on, I start to feel a little over-whelmed. 2008 was a shock. I hope to make 2009 a better year. This semester I'm taking on Business Applications, which is all about enterprise architecture and Knowledge Management Systems. Business Apps is taught by a practitioner

Microsoft Office Live and OneNote (reprise) and Live Mesh

2009-02-22T11:30:00.001+11:00

Well, I think I've managed to mix myself up again. How unusual... I blogged back in January about how great Office Live is but how I wish it would handle OneNote files. Exploring further, I found that Office Live isn't everything I'd thought / hoped and have probably gotten mixed up with what it does now and what is forthcoming when the new version of Office is released (probably late this year

Enterprise portals vs CMSes

2009-02-12T16:21:00.001+11:00

Note: Initially I was going to call this post "Project Managing Enterprise Portals" but somewhere along the line the post morphed into its current form. I expect this is a topic that I will want to revisit again soon... In my rather limited experience, I'm finding that SharePoint is often compared against products such as DotNetNuke. I've done it myself. However, the more I'm working with

Microsoft Office Live and OneNote

2009-01-22T13:36:00.003+11:00

At the Microsoft PDC in 2008, the boffins at Microsoft demonstrated OneNote working with Office Live (officelive.com) For those who don't know, Office live is Microsoft's improvement on Google Apps. It provides you with many of the components of Microsoft Office (eg. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and some Event, Task and Contact items (Outlook items) so that you can work without requiring Microsoft

I'm still here...

2009-01-07T01:00:00.002+11:00

No I haven't sailed off the edge of the world. The last quarter of 2008 was hectic to say the least.To recap quickly:I scored an H1 for my Project and Change Management subject at uni.I only managed a Pass grade for Enterprise Systems :( though missed out on a H3 by only a couple of points.I've been working towards MCTS certifications for SharePoint Application Development and SharePoint

My new Samsung i560

2008-09-05T19:05:00.001+10:00

I bought my new mobile phone a few weeks ago now - a shiny new Samsung i560. What appealed to me was the Symbian OS as I knew it was a widely used operating system, allowing me to install a wide variety of software. The phone also came equipped with a GPS - a gimmick. It just goes to show I'm not immune to them. :) I haven't had any success with getting the GPS unit to work and now my 14 day

Thoughts on implementing Enterprise Systems

2008-09-01T21:03:00.006+10:00

First up a disclaimer: my only experience with ERP is SAP and it presently amounts to about 6 weeks. So please SAP, don't sue me for defamation. For me the jury's out on the value of

Installed Ubuntu under VirtualBox tonight

2008-08-07T21:55:00.002+10:00

I installed VirtualBox tonight. VirtualBox is an open source virtual machine environment that runs on a variety of host platforms (including XP Home which I run at home). Set up was easy and working my way around the interface is dead easy. I also installed a copy of Ubuntu 7 from an ISO that I had lying around to see how it would go. The VirtualBox wizard for setting up the virtual machine was

Week 2 at Uni

2008-08-07T21:44:00.004+10:00

I've bitten off quite a bit this semester. Enterprise Systems has a lot of work. My first assignment is due on Friday next week. I need to review 4 webcasts from SAP's SAPphire 2008 and write an additional 1500 words or so to tie them up. Thankfully I'm feeling more confident after today's class. The interface also feels like it's UNIX heritage would suggest. It's built for speed that's for sure.

Sharepoint Developer Webcast Series

2008-08-05T11:35:00.004+10:00

John Holliday blogged about a new webcast series on Sharepoint development with Robert Bogue and Andrew Connell. The ones I've seen so far have been very clear and full of info.

Confluence and Sharepoint

2008-07-31T22:07:00.008+10:00

Well the Confluence - Sharepoint Connector went from beta v.0.5 to release 1.0 just like that. Rather a bit different to open source software I've played with (the connector most definitely isn't open source). Apart from having a flaky laptop with from which to run the demo, it went OK. I think I managed not to make a goose of myself in front of my workmates and boss.The search function works a

Uni's back for Semester 2 2008

2008-07-31T21:01:00.010+10:00

This is my second semester of my Masters in Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. For anyone who asks, I wanted something to do with another 20 hours of the week, so I went back to part time study.Last semester I only took one subject - Business Analysis Modelling and Design after having been sick in February. I did pretty well and scored first class honours (H1). Not a bad

What I'm doing at work - Sharepoint and Confluence

2008-07-17T00:42:00.003+10:00

I'm getting to know Confluence an enterprise wiki platform. Ultimately we want to be able to connect it to Sharepoint 2007 using the Confluence Sharepoint Connector, currently at v.0.5.Using this, you can embed Sharepoint list data in Confluence pages and can display Confluence pages and tree structures inside Sharepoint WebParts. The Confluence content is also fully searchable from within

A bit about me

2008-07-01T22:01:00.004+10:00

I'm living in Melbourne, Australia after having spent 8 years in Bendigo in Central Victoria where we were getting whole weeks with the temperature over 40 deg C. My mates and I would retire to one of the local dams just out of town; that is until there was a blue-green algae outbreak in it. At the moment, I reckon it'd be nice to see the sun again as we're in the middle of winter here in lovely