Dombat

How do we measure developer productivity? It isn't about counting lines of code.

Lessons to be learned when my log provider stopped working properly.

There's been a lot of media frenzy in recent weeks and months about how the Internet is killing the High street. Amazon, what bastards right? Well, they don't pay much tax, but when our tax system is so ridiculous you cant really blame them for that.

warning MSB3277: Found conflicts between different versions of the same dependent assembly that could not be resolved

Usually I either work on existing solutions or create new ones from scratch. It's very rare that I'll be given an existing project to work on that I have not worked on before. This has just happened. I have been seconded to help out a struggling

What is a deadline actually for? Unless it's for some legal date (such as GDPR) they are fairly pointless and dangerous.

If you don't use Static Analysis Tools (SAST) then you're missing out on a whole load of awesomeness which is generally free!

Everything was packed away while I built my new garage [http://www.dombat.co.uk/sorry-about-the-delay/] but now it's finished some boxes have started to come out of storage and back into my life. One of them contained some old books that have been kicking around for years

People fear conflict. It doesn't matter what position you are, there is a fear which can be irrational or debilitating.

When people hear the phase “Red Team” they either say “what’s that” or “isn’t that something to do with hackers”.

Video Tutorial The video shows a couple of simple examples in C#, basic testing with Owasp ZAP and mitigation using .NET. Background XSS occurs when the developer has trusted some input, but in the case of XSS the input is malicious code usually javascript. What is it? The website has

In my first few years as a developer it was common to work an hour or two extra hours per day. Me and my colleagues were all around the same age and young, free and single so it wasn't really work but just a continuation of our hobby.

In a large company it's often hard to be heard beyond your own department or manager. I've found a good way to get heard is to network with colleagues in other departments, I suppose in a way this is what business books would call "managing up and across".

At my company, I suggested that our team spends 2-3 days every two months to get together and do something new. The costs and risks to the company are low, yet there are some great benefits.

I've recently been tasked with playing around with Xamarin.Forms. In a nutshell, it is awesome, but I have encountered many small bugs that are quite inconveniencing for the novice.

I've been working with the awesome Xamarin.Forms [https://www.xamarin.com/forms] recently which was working just fine. I then needed to deploy a WCF service into my local IIS (my usual preference to IIS Express) for some testing. The virtual directory was created fine by Visual

17th November 2016 [http://www.dombat.co.uk/windows-10-anniversary-muffled-voices-with-soundblaster-card/] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- My machine has finally decided to update itself to Windows 10 Anniversary edition. To cut a long story short, when I came to watch some Xamarin programming videos on YouTube the voices were very muffled. Strangely Spotify, YouTube music and

We're lucky to have a career in such a dynamic industry. The technology just keeps progressing year after year. Change is so fast that it's often a struggle to keep up.

Do Ostriches really bury their head in the sand? I've always wondered that so it's time for a quick Google. The answer is a definite no! Never mind, it's a nice blog title so let's continue on the assumption they do.

I've been using a product recently that has its own simple programming language. As with Office VBA, it can really add benefit, even if the majority of users will never use it. It's the 80/20 rule - 80% of people only ever use 20% of

It's been a tough year at work. We've produced some great work yet in the eyes of a the big corporation none of that seems to matter. We've been battered by pension cuts, bonus cuts, benefit cuts, lack of resources and more. Big corporate