I've had a blog at this address since December of 2004. Initially I got hosting space to have a place to experiment and learn ASP.net for my day job. Around that time I also started working on HappyFish, which ended up consuming my free programming time. I posted infrequently, about 75 times in nearly three and a half years. Most of the posts to this blog were about HappyFish bugs or features up until I moved that project into its own domain in early 2007. The rest of the posts were links to other content on the web, generally programming references. I say all that because I've just orphaned all of those links. It's a web taboo, I know, but since the posts were just paths to the original content of others I doubt I'll bring down the interweb.

Today I'm starting fresh with a new blog and new software as well. The previous engine was Community Server, which I use (and will continue using) over on the HappyFish side. The forum feature is great. As of this writing there are 1124 users, and I'm certain that at least a dozen of them are legitimate, non-spam accounts. Here though I've switched to dasBlog, which I like a lot so far. The setup and customization was pain free. I spent too much time on this theme of course, but that's not their fault. I try to avoid design work because I tend to obsess over just the right font and color shades and am never happy for more than half an hour with the finished product. For now I'm okay with what I've come up with. The advantage of dasBlog for me though is that it uses XML as its back end instead of SQL Server. I need the SQL space for another project. Also, using Community Server for a single blog felt like swatting a fly with a howitzer.

Why the change? I'm not a programmer by training and when I switched careers I was mostly trying to keep up. It was the professional equivalent of my first cross-country practice. After nearly four years I'm nothing close to an expert, but I've learned a lot. Most of that learning came (and still comes) from hands-on experience guided by people around the web, in forums and in blogs, who took the time to type out a simple answer to a complicated question. I'm grateful, and I want to do for others what was done for me. To that end, I'm going to try to post regularly about what I do (ASP.net and WinForms) and how I do it. I'll also be taking a look at other technologies like Silverlight, WPF, WCF, and probably LINQ. I hope you find this blog as useful as I have found so many others.