Matthew Knott

It's been hard to find time to get much done this week outside of work, what with rugby and spending time with Michael and Lisa, but the ideas and output are still trickling through.

Digita Solutions

Every time I look at the v3 design for Digita Solutions, I come up against the same brick wall, what do we want to offer. I keep bouncing off the web design question, do we? don't we?

It's very frustrating not having the confidence in yourself to commit to an area of the business, my initial fears were over making it pay, but I think if the quality is there then you make it pay through competitive charging for the product, but not selling yourself short.

I really do believe that once we've finished the products we have in development then we'll have the capital to start looking at different services like web design.

This site

I'm planning something revolving around a photo gallery Silverlight application, and also setting this blog software up to post to multiple blogs simultaneously. With dual posting I can post items of consequence to other sites I maintain such as the digita solutions site. Would be great to do it form a single admin suite.

Life

After I was deeply disappointed with the shortages of Wii's when they first came out, a few years on we've finally bought one. Lisa want's a Wii fit, which frustratingly are in as short supply as the Wii's were. Very frustrating that Nintendo seem to want to create demand for the product even greater by not supplying in sufficient quantities, and then we end up with a situation like this, where hoarders buy up a large volume of the item and sell for £120 plus on eBay. Rediculous profiteering.

I've got dentist Friday, argh, no fillings please.

Work

It's been a slow week, but looks like things will really pick up tomorrow, may be a late night on the cards, I stayed on a little tonight, but the flexi will be useful for a long lunch in town next week I'm sure.

Tags: Rugby Work Blog Site Digita Solutions Lisa Webparts Wii Nintendo Business Plans Dentist Slow Moodle

Lets get something straight, I hate Microsoft SharePoint.

Not because it's a bad product or it's expensive licensing, it's because I'm a web developer being bullied and backed into a corner by it.

I actually think SharePoint is good for some things, its Active Directory integration, it's ease of use and powerful feature set, but it should know it's place. 

Microsoft may lead you to believe that it's all powerful with it's Master Pages and .net 2.0 framework construction, but in truth, it is not a good platform to build custom applications into. Even what should be a no brainer for something so powerful, connecting to an SQL database and returning tabulated data, is an absolute chore of the highest calibre.

I'm tasked with building bespoke solutions for a SharePoint portal, and the only way I can do this is through what are called webparts. These webparts are actually quite powerful, if a little limited, in that to build a multi-page application, you need to build lots of webparts and piece them together in multiple sharepoint pages.

It's a total bind, but I'm warming to them, looking at the positives I can deploy a web part across a huge number of different web portals very quickly, without duplicating any code. That's it for the positives so far, I'll let you know how I get on....

Tags: .net SharePoint Webpart Webparts SQL Custom Bespoke Development Portal