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What’s one of the first things that developers want/need/can’t live without? Multiple Monitors. In most cases this starts of with 2 or Dual monitors, but this should be a standard. More monitors means more screen real estate which means you can more things up in front of you which means you can get more done. [...]

Virtual Machines have been around for years. VMWare and Microsoft have been the main competitors for a while, both offering somewhat similar products. Parallels for Mac is another, and Virtual Box for pretty much everything. I have used them all. When it comes right down to it, VMWare, to me, is ahead of the rest, [...]

I recently blogged about the Facebook Graph API and if you have the Facebook C# SDK you can start making applications. After I had my Facebook app set up, I started making a C# Console application to just get my friends and see what I could do. Here is a snippet to get my friends [...]

I have been reading about Microsoft’s PivotViewer lately, and decided to try to get it going for myself. What is PivotViewer? Think of it as visual data slicing through a web page. What you do is take some data, and then tie records to images, and then publish out your “collection” and you can consume [...]

Recently there have been a couple of bigger development/programming issues that have needed to get resolved where time was of the essence, and some kind of “short cut” was needed. Bring in the “Hive Mind”. In Agile, there is Scrum, and XP .. pair programming. But what if you bring in 5-6 developers, put code [...]

Source Control. In my eyes, one of the best inventions of development. Software Developers have used it for years, and it allows them to easily develop in a team environment, and be less scared they will lose a change or not be able to see things they did historically. I have blogged a few times [...]

Have you ever wanted to quickly mockup software, website, iPhone app, etc? Most people do it on paper, or try something in Visio, or Word, or even Excel!!! But they just lack that feeling of what they want you to build. I was looking around on the web and stumbled upon Balsamiq Mockups I download [...]

Today I received an email asking to some extent best practices on development with SQL Server Integration Studio (SSIS) and Business Intelligence Developer Studio (BIDS) in a team environment. Here is part of the email: Me and another DBA belong to the same team, we have a SQL server with SSIS running. We use the [...]

Add /nosplash to the end of your visual studio shortcuts.. also you can also go to tools->options and change the startup to an empty environment to speed up open times  

Recently, in May 2008, I took a position with Stratagem. Though the summer I worked for 2 places as a consultant, KHS in Waukesha, and The Dept. Of Regulation and Licensing (DRL) in Madison. A little history. I was full time for W3i around 2 years, and then went independent for about a year, then [...]