Welcome!

So, welcome to my new blog!

If anyone’s actually reading this, I’ll be fairly surprised – but that’s Ok, as I’m doing this partly for personal benefit.  Like many others, I find that teaching subjects to people helps to crystallise them in my head, and it also makes me go that extra step in research so I’m well prepared when someone asks a tricky question!  And as I don’t have much opportunity to present interesting subjects at my current job, I though I’d try a bit of blogging as an alternative.

So, a little about myself and what might be appearing here.  I’ve been messing about with computers since my dad got me a Spectrum +3 (the one with the disk drive!) many years ago.  I dabbled with a bit of +3 BASIC at the time, and have been involved ever since – I started coding properly in Pascal at college, then went onto C, then university taught me the ways of OO coding in C++ and Java (not to mention a bit of assembler).  Happy days!

Unfortunately during my work experience I got involved in VB6, although I was happy enough to be getting paid for programming.  But when it came time to get a proper job, although I really wanted to stick with C++ or Java, as I had VB experience that’s all the agencies would give me.  Working for big companies using tools I didn’t like sucked all of the fun out of programming for me, and I kind of lost my mojo, not touching a line of code outside the office for a few years.

Even though I moved onto VB.Net, I didn’t really get back into it until I started studying for a job change – I fancied moving over to C# for a few reasons, so I though I’d better get up to speed before the inevitable technical tests.  So I bought a copy of Pro C# 2008 and the .Net 3.5 Platform, by Andrew Troelsen, and started studying.  This is a really well-written book, so much easier to read than the dry uni textbooks I’d seen before, written by an enthusiastic guy who seems to feel about software the way I used to, and it reignited my interest in programming.

Before long, I was coding away in the evenings, listening to podcasts, and reading the many interesting blogs out there – and I couldn’t believe how much I’d missed out on!  There was TDD, DDD, Agile, OR/Ms, mobile development, Silverlight, XNA Game Studio, so many interesting things! So I set about reading up on all of these interesting new technologies, trying things out in code, even going to geeky programmer meetings, and spreading the word to other developers at work.

And this is where you find me now, with a bit of knowledge and a keen desire to find out as much as I can about these topics, as well as all of the new things that seem to emerge every other week (now that I’m paying attention!).  In this blog I hope to write technical articals about development practices, TDD, patterns, and so on, as well as book reviews, personal findings, and anything related to development or .Net I think people should hear about.

Anyway, that’s much longer than I intended it to be any my lunch hour is officially over, so watch this space!  And maybe after a few weeks I’ll get around to putting my first actual post up…