When I first learnt ASP.NET I wrote a control for my website that told my visitors the weather I was currently experiencing. It was just a simple, fun project to help me learn. Now I’m using Orchard for my site I still want my visitors to know the weather I am experiencing. So this seemed like the ideal project for my first Orchard CMS module.

I wanted the module to display a widget that could be placed anywhere using Orchard’s new Widget Manager. At this point in time the documentation for making widgets isn’t complete and I’ve hit a few stumbling blocks along the way.

The first thing to …

Three years ago today I sat down at my computer to start my freelance career. I didn’t have any clients yet, but I had some leads that seemed pretty good and I was quietly confident that things would go well. I was my own boss and I was free to do what I wanted to do. I now call this day Freedom Day.

Things were a bit slow to take off. The leads, that had seemed good, turned out not to be. I’ve become a lot better over time at judging possible leads, but you still can’t always tell if one will actually lead to a project.

I had a very enjoyable first month doing my own projects while searching …

Orchard is an Open Source CMS being developed by Microsoft that uses .NET MVC. It’s still not officially released but I’ve been running this blog using it since the alpha release in April. Every time a new version has come out I’ve planned to close my own blog and move the final posts over here. Version 0.5 felt really close to letting me do that, but there were a few show stoppers.

Version 0.8 has just come out and I’ve just finished upgrading to it. All the show stoppers are gone and there are some really nice new features. I wouldn’t recommend it to a client just yet. It still needs some …

Here is a guest post I wrote for The Guardian Leeds Blog:

Happy 21st for Pyramid of Arts at Light Night Leeds

I've bought a lovely colouring book from my friend Andy.

To show how much fun I had doing one of the colourings I made this simple stop frame animation of my work. If you'd like to have this much fun, why not buy the Hexjibber Colouring and Activity Book.

I'm excited about the possibilities that touch screens and multi-touch screens will give us. I'm also interested in HTML 5 and making something that will work accross a variety of devices whether they have a touch screen or just a mouse. To play about with both I'm currently making a colouring book app that will work on an iPad, a desktop computer's browser and hopefully any other touch enabled phone browser.

<Canvas> is a new HTML tag that is part of HTML 5. It acts like a drawing surface that you draw on using JavaScript commands.

In JavaScript you can catch mouse and touch events. At …

I read a great article recently by Phil Haack on sending JSON to an action method. This was very timely as I wanted to do exactly that in the REST API I've been creating for Kensei, a video hosting website. However, I wanted to make it work with XML as well as JSON.

Phil Haack creates something called a JSON value provider, so I followed his example and created an XML value provider. I've used it on two projects now and it's worked a treat. I thought I'd share it with the world in the hope that it will be useful to others.

Source code

XML Value Provider (C# source)

To get this working in your …

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?