Luke Smith

I came up with a lightening bolt of an idea the other week while I was thinking of a small project to do to try out some new technology. This project has spiraled into a bigger project which I think could be quite cool and big - so there goes my evenings for the next few months.

The few people I’ve told the idea to seem to think it also sounds good, either that or they’re just humouring me so I waste my time on it. Either way it’s giving me a great chance to try out some technologies that interest me.

• Microsoft Virtual Earth
• ASP.NET MVC Framework - no more WebForms!
• jQuery - extremely powerful JavaScript library, I’ve only scratched the surface so far
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 - Only really for the spatial features, but I’ve noticed some other cool features like passing tables as a parameter to UDFs
• Silverlight - I’ve not started working with this yet, but it’s on the todo list (in my head) to use

Hopefully it will encourage me to blog more, I’ll be sharing bits and pieces as I go along.

I discovered a free Subversion source control provider (assembla) so all my work is safely backed up remotely (maybe I should use the project management tools to keep a track of ideas). Ideally I’d like to do host the source control myself, only currently I can’t afford to change (or find one that matches (will match) my needs) hosting provider to a Virtual Private Server.

I’ve had this exception happen to me so many times in the past but I’m always forgetting what the solution is. It ends up I keep forgetting to have "SQL Server and Windows Authentication mode" selected in the properties window for the database server.