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Today Tracey sat and passed the final exam of her certification, meaning she’s now a Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer. Congratulations Tracey!

The short working months of December and January make it really easy to fall behind on things such as blogging. We’ve had a few updates worth writing about between December and now, so here's a quick update from the world of Ignition Development. Towards the end of last year we finally got around to becoming a Microsoft Certified partner (Silver Application Development for now, maybe some gold in the future? Who knows!). Thanks to Tracey and Jan for smashing an exam each, and to our customers who allowed us to use them as references. We actually finalised the requirements in...

As we were moving from the age of hand crafted stored procedures and inline SQL into the new age of OR-mappers, we had a few different choices to make in terms of which product to go with. After a period of research we eventually decided on staying away from third party applications as much as possible and relied on Microsoft’s Entity Framework (as Linq2SQL was fading away at that point). Over the many years I’ve spent developing applications, I’ve always managed to end up in the role where I try to improve performance where ever it’s possible, and about 90%...

I came across a couple of links talking about working remotely. It’s something we’re big believers in here at Ignition, so I thought I’d post them here: Why We (Still) Believe in Working Remotely – I especially like point #3, as we believe it’s way more positive to look at the code that people are checking in, rather than making sure they’re sitting at their desk for a certain amount of hours per day. A (Short) Rant About Working Remotely Remote working isn’t suitable for every business, or for every person, but it works well for us.

In a recent “end of year” type conversation in the team IRC channel we were talking about the range of external providers/third party services that we’d worked with / integrated to over the course of 2011. Here’s the list we compiled – I still have a nagging feeling we’ve missed a couple, but nonetheless it’s a pretty varied range of products and services that we’ve worked with on top of our standard stack of ASP.NET WebForms, MVC, and jQuery. Google Commerce Search – working with the latest version of this while the documentation was being written/revised was certainly a challenge,...

Ignition Development’s own Jan Heggernes has written up a post where he covers some of the errors and worst practices he’s come across while working with it. Jan has done a lot of work with the Entity Framework, and specifically has spent a lot of time working with performance tuning applications using it, and he’s somewhat of an expert in this space. Check it out on his blog: Common Entity Framework Errors and Performance Tips   -Ross Tags: Entity Framework

Are you interested in a bit of information about the use of Entity Framework with Caching and ViewState? Well read on – actually, go back and read the link back there, this one. The post is quick introduction to EF caching in ASP.NET applications written by Ignition consultant Jan Heggernes. Tags: Entity Framework, Caching