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November 6, 2009

How to explain SEO to cynical developers

By Craig Bailey

5 Min read

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06November

Have you ever been involved in the hiring process for your company or team? If you have, then perhaps you’ve been astounded at how terrible the CVs of many highly intelligent candidates you interviewed were. Senior developers who excelled at their craft, were recognised as brilliant by their peers, and yet, couldn’t seem to put together a coherent CV to save themselves. Why? It’s a little...

November 5, 2009

SBTUG: Social Networking and Chocolate

By Craig Bailey

5 Min read

30 comments

05November

If you’re like me, then you probably cringe when you see people referring to themselves as a ‘social media strategist’. And if they point to Gary Vaynerchuk as their main example of why you too should embrace social media then I really despair. Too often it seems, we’re told of the wonderful success stories, with scant mention of the hard work, sweat and perserverance these overnight...

November 2, 2009

Nice knowing you Partner

By Craig Bailey

2 Min read

12 comments

02November

One of the core building blocks of Microsoft’s success over the past decades has been its close relationship with partners. The Microsoft Partner Network (previously Partner Program) has helped Microsoft reach (via their partners) every conceivable sector of the myriad markets they service. And in return, Microsoft was known to be very loyal, supportive and even protective of its partners...

October 21, 2009

Windows 7 Launch

By Craig Bailey

9 Min read

6 comments

21October

Or more correctly: The Jeff Putt Show   What you would do if you had to organise a product launch? How would you structure it? You’d probably get marketing to pump out a few of the pretty videos, crank the upbeat motivating soundtracks and speed through the nice photo slideshows. But then, what would you focus on? Would you put the Managing Director of the company up first. Yes, you would...

October 20, 2009

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

By Craig Bailey

1 Min read

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20October

I love the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 pitch – no namby-pamby here: This is no namby-pamby beta. It’s a full-octane beta release with a “Go Live” license that you can use to concept, build, test, and deploy* your next project. The Beta 2 has just been released, and whilst it seems to be downloading/installing OK, I notice that most of the download pages still refer to Beta 1 (but I’m...

October 16, 2009

TFS Basic 2010 – Team Foundation Server

By Craig Bailey

3 Min read

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16October

I missed this little announcement about ‘TFS Basic’ a few weeks back, but luckily Adam Cogan alerted me to it during one of our recent walks (can you tell where we stopped for lunch :-) ). The news came from Brian Harry originally, but you could be forgiven for missing it since his blog post was extensive (that’s a good thing!) and covered a history of SourceSafe before mentioning TFS Basic...

October 16, 2009

Microsoft, Cloud failure and T-Mobile

By Craig Bailey

3 Min read

2 comments

Society puts a premium on getting access to ‘news’ as quickly as possible. The person who breaks the story first gets the rewards. Speed to market trumps quality delivered to market every time. It’s a shame really. Take the T-Mobile debacle as an example. The story kicked off two weeks ago, but hit fever pitch last Saturday with news from TechCrunch of T-Mobile losing all customer data and...

October 16, 2009

WordPress Pretty Permalinks on IIS 7.0

By Craig Bailey

2 Min read

4 comments

Just a quick tip if you run your WordPress site on IIS 7.0 and run into issues with pretty permalinks. It’s pretty easy to configure: there’s a full tutorial here on the Learn IIS site and the WordPress Codex has a good overview too. You just need to add a few lines into your web.config file. [If you don’t know what a web.config file is don’t get too concerned. All you need to do is copy...

October 14, 2009

SharePoint 2010 Extravaganza

By Craig Bailey

6 Min read

6 comments

14October

Perhaps you’ve been hearing a lot about SharePoint 2010 lately… or perhaps not! Most likely the latter because most of the juicy bits have been locked under NDA. Until the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas next week that is! Yes, and once the NDA wrappers are off there’s tons of goodness to talk about. Which is why we’re having a special SharePoint 2010 Extravaganza at the Sydney...

October 7, 2009

Migrating from BlogEngine.NET to WordPress

By Craig Bailey

3 Min read

34 comments

07October

After too much pain with both BlogEngine.NET and GoDaddy hosting I moved this site over to WordPress (on DreamHost) last week. I’ve been using WordPress and DreamHost for years on my other sites, so it was only a matter of time before my personal blog finally made the move. Recent issues with BlogEngine.NET – including Search and Comments not working after a recent update – were the final...