Community developer blogs

Colin Angus Mackay

Recent Posts

• Developer Day Scotland

  Posted: 08 Jun 2007 at 01:15 by Colin Angus Mackay

  I'm getting hopeful that there will be a DDD (Developer Day) style event in Scotland some time soon. In other words it would be on a Saturday. It would last the whole day. There would be different tracks so you could pick and choose what you wanted to see. The atmosphere would be great! There have n

• Pay Pal, How I Hate Thee

  Posted: 03 Jun 2007 at 23:21 by Colin Angus Mackay

  Why is it that every time I try and use Pay Pal I get some sort of problem. I have recently "bought" a Microsoft Optical Trackball from a seller on eBay. Not something I do often, but it seems that eBay is the only place I can get these now - and since every other pointing device I use causes me pai

• Developer Day 5 - Sold out in 4 days

  Posted: 03 Jun 2007 at 16:41 by Colin Angus Mackay

  Actually I don't know how quickly Developer Day 5 sold out in. It was announced on May 30th and I noticed on June 2nd the registration page had a notice on it that any further registrations would be going directly onto the wait list. 350 (approx) developers signed up and packed out the venue in less

• Developer Day 5

  Posted: 03 Jun 2007 at 11:13 by Colin Angus Mackay

  DDD5 seems to have sold out in less that a week this time. I've also been looking at the final agenda to get an idea of what I'd like to see. There are a few time slots where I'd like to see two sessions at once so I'll be thinking hard about which we go for. For the moment my choice is as follows:

• Customised Google Search

  Posted: 09 May 2007 at 12:41 by Colin Angus Mackay

  I've been playing around with Google's customised search recently. It is great, I can create a filter on Google that means that, for the majority of the time, I get the results that I want. The majority of the time I search MSDN, Code Project, my own website and my blog. MSDN is the main documentati

• Unit Testing a static class

  Posted: 07 May 2007 at 22:21 by Colin Angus Mackay

  I've been trying to find a way to unit test a static class. That is, a class that has no instances. The problem has been that at the end of one test the class's state could be altered which would mean that at the start of the next test its state would be unknown. This could lead to buggy unit tests.

• Google Map of Scottish Developers Event Location

  Posted: 29 Apr 2007 at 19:46 by Colin Angus Mackay

  Google maps has a cool feature that allows you to draw annotations on a map. I've created one detailing the transportation links (bus station, railway station and car parks) nearest the location of the upcoming Scottish Developer events. To create a map like this all you need is an account with Goog

• Developer Day 5 - dates for the diary

  Posted: 23 Apr 2007 at 00:41 by Colin Angus Mackay

  It looks like the organisers of Developer Day 5 (DDD5) are beginning to have things come together. I've just picked up the dates the agenda will be available and when the event booking will open. 27th April - Session submissions close 28th April - Voting for sessions starts 19th May - Voting for ses

• How do you return error conditions?

  Posted: 23 Apr 2007 at 00:32 by Colin Angus Mackay

  A recent poll on Code Project asked: How do you return error conditions? I was disappointed to find that in the event of a "critical error that leaves the app in an undefined state" a shocking 5% of people would "cover up the mess and don't say anything". I think I would be shocked at even just one

• Technorati Tag Builder (Update)

  Posted: 22 Apr 2007 at 22:37 by Colin Angus Mackay

  Since announcing my little application to help make technorati tags easier for my blog posts I've gone and fixed a couple of bugs. I suppose that's what you get for writing an application in a few minutes - not enough time for testing. So, now that non-alphanumeric characters are encoded properly an

• SQL Server 2005 - XML Query Plans

  Posted: 22 Apr 2007 at 21:27 by Colin Angus Mackay

  Scottish Developers are putting on an event at Glasgow Caledonian University on SQL Server 2005 - XML and XML Query Plans. It is being held on the 6th June, 2007 at 19:00. In this presentation Martin Bell, will be looking at the different ways to create XML query plans such as T-SQL statements, SQL

• Cycle

  Posted: 22 Apr 2007 at 11:30 by Colin Angus Mackay

  Yesterday I went on a training cycle. I've entered into a charity cycle and I thought that it would be an excellent incentive to get on my bike and get some excercise. Yesterday I cycled 25km along the River Clyde - which is roughly 3 times longer than I've ever cycled in a single session before. I

• Technorati Tag Builder

  Posted: 15 Apr 2007 at 23:26 by Colin Angus Mackay

  I've just created a wee tool to help generate Technorati tags for blog posts. I started tagging my posts a few weeks ago and discovered that it was actually quite cumbersome to insert them. Technorati do provide a basic tool to help on their website, but it involved picking up the tag on the search

• Visual Studio 2005 on Vista

  Posted: 15 Apr 2007 at 10:22 by Colin Angus Mackay

  I've got Visual Studio 2005 installed on Vista - It wasn't the trouble free installation I'd hoped for. I had to go through the installation cycle twice. On the first attempt it got so far and then informed me that that it couldn't continue due to "known compatibility issues" and that I had to insta

• Don't have the TV on in the background

  Posted: 15 Apr 2007 at 00:12 by Colin Angus Mackay

  I've got the TV on in the background. Not something I do often, and not something I indend to keep doing because of what I've just heard. In the background is that reality TV show where they get people to work towards appearing in a new production of Grease. They've just auditioned one person who wa

• Got Vista Installed

  Posted: 14 Apr 2007 at 14:29 by Colin Angus Mackay

  I've finally installed Vista on my PC! It wasn't a trouble free installation though. IT is always good to have a clean out of old stuff from time to time, so I took this opporunity to blow away the cobwebs of my old XP installation so during the installation I reformatted the partition where my XP i

• How to ask a question

  Posted: 10 Apr 2007 at 18:53 by Colin Angus Mackay

  You may have noticed the odd rant now and again when I get frustrated at people on forums who need help but seem incapable of doing even the tiniest thing to help themselves in the first place. If you haven't and are sufficiently voyeuristic here are a selection: Help me to help you Wading through s

• Article on DevCity

  Posted: 09 Apr 2007 at 21:12 by Colin Angus Mackay

  An article of mine, that originally appeared on Code Project, has been accepted on DevCity. The article has been slightly rewritten to be more VB.NET centric in line with the site it appears on. See Passing Values Between Forms in VB.NET

• To blog or not to blog

  Posted: 08 Apr 2007 at 16:03 by Colin Angus Mackay

  The BBC has an article about companies letting their staff blog, or not, entitled Companies urged: "Let your staff blog". Personally, I don't blog about the place where I work. I rarely mention it at all. On the odd occasion where I have mentioned work situations it has alwasy been well in the past

• Because you have a passion for it

  Posted: 08 Apr 2007 at 00:20 by Colin Angus Mackay

  A thread recenly appeared on Code Project from a new author. He was put off by the apparent low votes he received for his article on C# Coding Standards. The article itself wasn't too bad for a first attempt and a number of the regulars attempted to offer suggestions and to encourage him. The best c