Information: Digital and Printed

No it's not a comparison post. Today I had three great things happen.
First, I got my car back from the shop, and thus, my independence.
But that's not as important as the next two.

My Amazon shipment arrived! 3 new books for me to play with, although I've read parts of two of them before. They are all based around development and design.

• Refactoring: Improving the design of existing code (Martin Fowler)
• Refactoring to Patterns (Joshua Kerievsky)
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Gang of 4)

No doubt design patterns and refactoring will pop into my posts, and these books (along with others) may get a mention.

The third thing to mention is that I got a new hard drive. 400gb SATA drive, which is going into the very PC I am typing this post from. Why am I mentioning this? Only because I thought I'd mention that it brings my total disk space to 1.5 terrabytes of ACTUAL disk space (you know how a 400gb drive will present as having only 340gb available space... I'll look into this one day!).

Of that 1.5tb, I have used 1tb (thus the need for a new drive). How can someone use so much disk space? Well this PC has Media Centre. Last year I recorded the whole FIFA World Cup. I didn't trim out the pre-game coverage and post game analysis yet, so each game is around 8Gb (that's not counting the longer games that had extra time and penalties).

I guess if you have the disk space, you're going to use it.

Blogging from your own domain... like me!

Notice the domain name of this blog: http://blog.snagy.name

I decided that I would host the blog on my site, rather than go with a free one hosted elsewhere.
I knew this would be a risk-ladden (the risk being serious loss of time) task and not one that I could justify as a good use of my time (especially to my wife who still doesn't have a fully tiled toilet; the toilet bowl is currently in the shower! How's that for water saving...)

As usual, GOOGLE came to the rescue. Their blogging site (www.blogger.com) is free, but better yet, it lets you host your blog at your own location. It's as easy as naming your blog, and specifying an FTP server, username, and password. Oh, and picking a theme.

So when you post a comment, you use the blogger portal. I post a new blog entry, I use the blogger portal. When I click "Publish" it FTP's a static HTML page to my FTP server. It's that easy, trust me.

I'll prove it. Here, I'll click the "Publish" button now...

Flash Dance

Who would have thought my first development post would be about Flash?

I don't even really use it for anything! None-the-less, there is a certain amount (minimal) of flash work that needs to occur at my work.

Currently we don't have enough licences to install Macromedia products on my PC so I went in search of some free tools for working with Action script and compiling flash movies.

This is what I found: SEPY ActionScript Editor

http://www.sepy.it

This is a nice util that lets you open flash project files and gives strong text editing tools like autocompletion and text highlighting.

You can also hook it up with a free ActionScript compiler called mtasc:

http://www.mtasc.org

With these 2 free tools I am now having fun in ActionScript land!

And on the 8th day God created blogs...

Welcome to Steven Nagy's .NET development blog.

Why am I starting this blog? I don't think it will fill any particular void in the dissemination of information relating to development. There's a lot of blogs out there, and I will endeavor to link in the ones I feel relevant to the topic. But this blog?

Well for one thing I don't plan on letting the topics scale in complexity. Each topic will usually be concise. This means I can post more often, rather than writing an essay which I feel I will need to proof read. It also means that as I discover things of interest, I can post a brief blurb, and then simply link to it.

So what are the topics of interest here? Here's a brief list of the kinds of things that interest me and that I will probably blog about:

• Technologies like ASP.NET, C#, dHTML, CSS and Javascript
• Software like Visual Studio, CodeSmith, and Expression Studio
• Companies like Microsoft and Google
• Theory like design and development patterns
• Fun stuff like new startups and products

There will probably be other stuff in there too. I'm pretty Microsoft focused, but I'm open minded as well. As a developer it's useful to be aware of all the different tools, APIs, design patterns, and techniques at my disposal, and it's this information that I want to share with you, whether you are a beginner, or advanced.

So stick around. I'm constantly learning and I want to share that learning with you.