Last weekend I went to Microsoft Webcamps London: a two day event mainly about ASP.NET MVC and a little bit about the Entity Framework. It was a two day event mainly aimed at Microsoft developers who'd not used .NET MVC before. I've done a few MVC projects now, but there's always more to learn and it's always good to meet other people doing similar stuff to you.

The first day was a series of talks by Jon Galloway and Christian Wenz. The talks were excellent and even though they covered a lot of things I already knew, I still found out lots I didn't and made lots of notes.

The second day was …

My friend Dave and some of his colleagues from TH_NK are doing a very impressive bike challenge. They're cycling from Newcastle to London in aid of Breast Cancer Campaign. They're going to do this over 5 days.

Inspired by this I've decided to do the same, well sort of. I'm going to cycle the same distance, but over 30 days and I'm going to cycle where ever I feel like. I'm just doing this for fun, but if you feel like sponsoring anyone, please sponsor Dave and his gang.

This is also partly to make full use of my new Garmin Edge 705 cycle GPS. I got it on Friday and have cycled loads …

I've been thinking about the logo for my new site. Here are a few of my ideas:

What do you think?

This is going to be my new web site. Nogginbox.co.uk will be the new online home of Richard Garside. But, it's not quite ready yet.

This site is running on a new CMS called Orchard. Orchard uses ASP.NET MVC, a server side technology that I've been using a lot lately and have found to be very effective. Orchard is only in alpha at the moment, so it's really early days. It's Open Source and being developed by Microsoft; strange, but true.  I think it shows a lot of potential and I'm hoping to be able to use it for lots of projects when it's ready.

It's also early days for Noggin Box. …

The iPhone and iPad were criticized for not allowing you to show Flash content. Adobe hit back by developing an export to iPhone feature that promised to turn Flash apps into iPhone apps. This was due to be released soon in Flash Creative Suite 5. I was really looking forward to it. As a developer I’ve found the learning curve for iPhone development very steep; the provided tools are lacking and not as good as many other development tools. Programming for the iPhone feels a bit like stepping back ten years in time. It's a much more pleasant experience using Microsoft's developer tools. I don' …

The web is a world of unlimited choice and unlimited possibilities. So why does everyone choose to use Facebook? Why is the web dominated by a few big companies?

I watched the first part of the BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution yesterday on iPlayer. They made the point that:

When there are no rules, there is nothing to stop those with huge resources dominating everyone else.

Google is obviously the biggest at this point in time, but Facebook is also massive. I don’t really mind Google. They’re big because they’re good and more importantly if I want to use another search engine I can …

I'm working on a Jam Jar Collective project at the moment that involves projection and motion tracking. This is a little tester app that hooks up to your webcam and follows any movement it sees. Press 'Start webcam' to have a go. You need to have a webcam and your computer will ask your permission to use it.

This motion tracking app was made using Flash CS4 and ActionScript 3. You can download the source code if you fancy tinkering with it.

The great thaw is upon us now and these snowbots are no more. I've loved the snow, in particular, making stuff out of it. The snowbots are one of my favourite creations. There were a collaboration with the very fine snow artist Squirrel. He created the one on the left, but is also responsible for the eyebrows on mine. We made them while at January's Open Coffee and it was brilliant fun.

You can see more snowbot photos on Flickr.

I've been a freelancer now for two years and things have been going pretty well. The start of a decade seems like a significant time and a good time to think about what I'd like to do in the next ten years.

Collaborate more on projects with interesting people

There's a perfect size job for a single freelancer, but I'd also like to work on more varied and larger projects. Collaborating with other skilled freelancers is a great way to do this. Plus, you get someone to bounce ideas off and you get to learn from the experience of someone else. I've done a few collaborative projects so far and I'd …

This was just a little Sunday project inspired by the number of strikes we’ve been having and the isitchristmas.com website. Isthereastrike.co.uk lists organisations that have been experiences strikes and then has a simple yes/no page for each one.

As the site is very simple it was also a nice test bed for a few things I’ve been learning about lately. It runs on ASP.NET MVC (it may be the simplest MVC site ever), has an Entity Framework data model keeping track of the strikes and has a Dynamic Data admin section.

There is a small unit test for the project using xUnit and I’m going to try …