Contracting – A Year (Almost) After Taking the Leap

So it was about this time last year that i decided to move out of Permanent employment and into the cattle market that is Contracting. Looking back I have to say that I’m happy with my decision and have no regrets on that front. That said, the last year has not been plain sailing and in this post (during which I will try not to rant too much) I’ll try to paint a fair picture of the good and the bad from the last year. Contrary to what many people may think, my decision to enter the Contracting market had nothing to do with charging huge day rates. Yes money is important but, as people who know me will confirm, I always say

“If you don’t like what you are doing then do something else”

Using Client-Side jQuery to Send Data to Server-Side .NET

Back in March 2009 I wrote a blog post about calling code-behind methods using Javascript and while looking at my Google Analytics recently I was surprised to see that this post still receives about 650 hits a month. Why am I surprised? Well the post is almost three years old now and with technology moving on at a rapid rate there are much better (i.e. easier and cleaner) ways of sending data from the client to the server. In this post I’ll demonstrate just one of them which uses jQuery and a standard ASP.NET web application, i.e. not MVC although there is no reason why this approach will not work just as well there as well.

First Android Application Released – FillLPG

To those of you who are are following the mini-series on using maps in Android it will not come as a great surpise that I have now released my first Android application which implements Google Maps.

Using Google Maps in your Android Applications – Part 4 [Displaying Information Popups]

This tutorial was created using the Google Maps API v1 and as it is not possible to obtain a v1 key anymore this series of posts is pretty much obsolete. I’ve been looking at creating an updated set of tutorials and I’ll post them as soon as they are ready.

A little later than hoped and by popular demand (OK, at the time of writing there were only two requests in the comments of the previous part) this is the last part of this mini-series looking at using Google Maps in your Android applications.

In previous parts we have configured our project and displayed a simple map, centered the map on our current location and displayed markers on points of interest. Now we are going to allow the user to tap on one of these markers in order to see additional details about the associated location.

Moving from WordPress to Drupal 7

When I initially started this site it was a simple blog implemented using the Joomla! Content Management System. This was soon replaced by Wordpress which has been the underlying platform for about two years – until now.