A software engineering and leadership blog

  • Writing my first iPhone app

    By Phil Hale
    Since I've just finished writing an iPhone app for the Teesside basketball league I thought it would be a good time to write about some of my experiences of iPhone development.Update April 2015 - Unfortunately the Teesside basketball league is no more so I have shut down the website and removed the... [Read More]
  • Using variables with Seleium IDE

    By Phil Hale
    Testing part of the application I work on involves filling out a fairly long registration form. I've been using Selenium IDE to make my life easier but I still have to change a few fields before I can submit the form. I.e. Email and username, because they must be unique.... [Read More]
  • Bad times with Entity Framework and WCF

    By Phil Hale
    I recently wanted to make some data from a .NET MVC website I built some time ago available externally via a web service. After a little research I decided WCF was the way to go and set about creating a test service class that would return some data which was accessed using... [Read More]
  • Simple feature toggles in .NET 4

    By Phil Hale
    The problemWhere I currently work we use continuous integration. When software is in development this doesn't cause any problems. Just commit, it doesn't matter if you break something or add a new feature. When your software is live, it's a whole different story, everything becomes a bit scarier. Assuming you release... [Read More]
  • How to be a programmer

    By Phil Hale
    It's all in the title really. How to be a programmer: a short, comprehensive, and personal summary is a short essay by Robert L. Read on how to be a programmer. It covers beginner, intermediate and advanced skills and breaks each one down into smaller areas such as personal skills, team skills,... [Read More]