Peter Shaw

There’s no doubt about it; ASP.NET MVC has made developing a web application child’s play, in this day and age. Add a front end framework such as Twitter Bootstrap into the mix, and you suddenly have the ability to make your application user interface look really great too. Unfortunately, there’s still one pain point that […]

The WPF scene has exploded as the now-dominant desktop application scene for Windows desktop applications. Couple that with the new Windows 8-style store apps and XAML, it looks like it has a very rosy future indeed. The problem is, WPF is hard, very hard. You have Prism, MVVM Light, MVVM Cross, Catel, and dozens of […]

We all know the scenario: The boss has come downstairs and asked you to process some data for him. Sure you say, it’s no problem. Email me a copy of the data, and I’ll do what I need to then email you the results back. Ten minutes later, you get an email entitled “Here’s the […]

Many of the newer breed of .NET developers have entered a world where they only know ASP.NET MVC as a way of developing complex web applications; there are, however, still a great many of the slightly older generation out there who are stuck in Webforms land. This generation is being dragged kicking and screaming towards […]

As is often the case with these posts, this one started out as something completely different 🙂 I was going to do a simple post on a nice animated splash screen for your WPF apps, but I got a bit carried away with the animation stuff. In fact, I got so carried away with it, […]

Have you handled multithreaded code in the apps that you write? I’m willing to bet that you likely have, especially these days when terms like “Full Stack Developer” basically mean, IT practitioner than can do just about any IT related role. Even if your primary role is a front end web developer, there’s a high […]

It seems, these days, that everyone is going “Cloud Crazy.” I mean, really, what is the big deal about the cloud? Well, okay, it’s massively accessible and synced across global data centres around the world; but, outside of that sphere, there’s nothing massively different about cloud versus a traditional hosting account on a standard server. […]

In this day and age of web applications, you might be forgiven for thinking that we don’t require software installation applications any longer. However, the very opposite is true; a lot of web applications are still shipped out to organisations to run on their own internal web servers. There’s actually not a large amount of […]

Many older devs in .NET will know exactly what I’m talking about when I mention P/Invoke; a lot of newer devs, however, will very likely not. This is not because they’ve never been trained in it, or their college/university had gaps in their education; it’s simply because there’s really not much call for it to […]

Every PC I’ve ever used has had at least one. In fact, in times gone by it wasn’t rare to see two, sometimes even three of them. What am I talking about? The humble RS232 Serial port. Some of the younger readers of this article might at this point be scratching their heads wondering what […]

If there’s one thing I see, get asked many, many times especially by new developers working on .NET and that’s the age old question of: “How do I know when it’s appropriate to use a static construct?” Well, to be perfectly honest, in all the years I’ve been writing .NET code, I still ask myself […]