It is a new year and I wanted to start out with a fresh new blog focused specifically and only on software development. Specifically I will be writing about .NET and more generally I will get into topics such as JavaScript, CSS, AJAX and various trends happening in web development. You can also expect some topics related to my book, Pro ASP.NET for SQL Server. There are topics in the book that were not fully developed because they did not fall into the scope for the book. Here I will go beyond the scope of the book and also post updates to techniques covered in the book.

Tutorials

Over the past year and a half I have been publishing projects with source code at SmallSharpTools.com. I have not fully covered what can be done with each of these projects or how they work, so I plan to write tutorials on each of the projects to explain how you can use them directly in your own projects as well as learn how they work so you can apply the same techniques in your own work. There really is a lot in there that I use all the time and I know these coming tutorials will be useful to you as well.

Tips

Occasionally I will have a short and useful tidbit such as a trick I use in Visual Studio to make it easier to work with ASP.NET. I am always finding ways to be more productive as a developer by using lesser known features in Visual Studio or coding features that are often overlooked. These will be short posts that get right to the point. And with this blog you should be able to subscribe to those tips independently of the rest of the blog. If I can backlog enough of these I will start posting them on a regular basis once a week.

A Better Blog

With this new blog I want to improve on my previous blog. In my other blog, which I will still keep going, covered topics outside of .NET development that I wanted to write about but may have distracted from the goal of the blog. The goal with this blog is clearly defined as a tips and tutorials blog. Beyond staying on point I will also more clearly lay out a topic into multiple pieces, similar to when I wrote 7 Steps to MSBuild. I personally do not have the time or patience to read a blog entry that goes beyond more than a few paragraphs, so I will limit the size of each post in this way. In addition to what I write, I also plan to augment what I write with either a podcast or a screencast to help cover the topic more effectively. I really prefer passively listening to a good podcast while driving somewhere or sending a screencast to my large LCD with the help of Windows Media Center and my Xbox 360. Augmenting the text with audio and video in this way should make for a better blog.

Please subscribe with your favorite RSS aggregator and soon you will get my next entry. My first series will be on JavaScript with ASP.NET with my Kvetch Reborn web application as the example.