Don Xml's Grok This

It really boggles my mind what some firms (both consulting and client) are trying to pay Information Technology consultants these days. I think that, for the most part, there are a lot firms and hiring managers that do not understand how Information Technology consulting companies operate. Seeing that I’ve been in this business for a very long ...

It has been a very long time since we last had a New Jersey Developers Dinner, but that is going to change this week.  Any Information Technology professional (developer or ITPro) that lives or works in New Jersey is welcome to attend the NJDD.  The date is August 24, 6PM, at the Harvest Moon in New Brunswick, NJ.  The only people ...

I’ve been a big fan of LookoutSoft’s Lookout Outlook Search Plugin for a couple years now, and with Microsoft buying them it was only going to be a matter of time before Microsoft yanked the free download from the LookoutSoft site.  Well, today I was talking to someone about this cool Outlook search plugin, and navigated over to ...

Rocky accidentally ignited the wrath of a couple .Net Test Driven Design guys (see Jeff Palermo’s post for a good example). with his recent interview on .Net Rocks, and then tries to explain his comments a bit better on his blog entry: Forests, trees, testing and design.  Now, I don’t always agree with Rocky’s architecture ...

Jeff Palermo’s  RAD kills. . . software - level 200 strikes a familiar chord with me.  But I’d also like point out that although RAD isn’t something that I want to use when building an enterprise ready application, you have to watch out for the opposite of RAD, Analysis Paralysis.  Where RAD lets you develop ...

Robert Scoble has a nice write up on why tech conferences are expensive to run, but leaves out one of the most successful “nouveaux” conferences around, Code Camps, which happen to be totally free.  Thom Robbins (a Microsoft Developer Evangelist) is the man behind the idea, and has his Code Camp Manifesto.  Code Camps ...

If you are one of my regular readers, you know that I’m a senior .Net consultant out of New Jersey, and don’t do the traveling thing.  I’m sort of in between career plateaus, and trying to migrate from the 40 hours a week at one client style of consulting to having more then one client style.  If you know of someone ...

I’ve seen a couple .Net bloggers talking about migrating away from the old .Text code base to non-.Net blogging tools like WordPress, and I realized that I really needed to blog about the new CommunityServer 2.0.  I’d link back the bloggers that are considering moving, but I don’t want to place any outside pressure on their ...

Last night (Jan. 11, 2006) was the monthly Northern NJ .Net User Group (N3UG.org) meeting, and Stephen Forte was the speaker (sponsored by Ineta).  Stephen’s discussion was on Design Patterns in ASP.Net 2.0 (if you are a member of Ineta, I highly recommend that you request them to send Stephen to speak at your group!) and during the ...

Here’s an update on my .Net Community Contest.  I’ve decided what I’m doing with my three MSDN Universal subscriptions, and I’m going to give them away to people in the NJ .Net Community that have stepped up to the cause and tried to help grow our little community.  I’ve talked to some other folks that were ...