I see questions appear every so often on message boards regarding people wanting to start programming and trying to figure out where to start. While the ‘standard’ answer seems to be Java, I have posted many times in tips and on message boards that I believe Visual Basic .NET (express editions) are the best starting point. However, for a really good...

For those of you either hiring programmers / IT people or looking to get a job in this type of field you are probably aware there are tons of people available. So how do you recognize / know if you are a good one? A great article to help answer this is “How to recogni[z]e a good programmer“. Although this article focuses on programmers, I believe the...

I have written several tips in the past about the remarkable (and free) Visual Studio Express Editions made available by Microsoft. If you are a user of Visual Studio, then here is a great article pointing out some tips and tricks you may not know about. Some points of interest from the article:Store Commonly Used Code Snippets in the Toolbox Using TODO, HACK,...

So you want to be a programmer. But you don’t want to spend tens of thousands of dollars in training. You want something you can learn that’s cheap, always in demand and can be learned easily. Sound like you? Then you want to be a Microsoft Access consultant. MS Access consultants are always needed for companies both large and small. And the best...

One of the most beautiful things about the internet is that anyone can develop a program, post it on a web site and charge for it. And if the program is good at whatever it does, people will readily pay for it. "But I know very little about programming", you may say. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist. All you need is a...

Said honestly it bothers me that most people think the term hacker in relation to computers means (loosely), "An individual with the intent to harm electronically", such as breaking into someone else’s email account, stealing files, etc. The term has become so broad that it’s used as an excuse for people’s stupidity. Example: "My...

Yesterday I posted a tip for people looking to get into programming, so today I am going to point .Net developers to a tool I have found incredibly useful: Exception Reporter. ExceptionReporter is a .NET component (C#) that adds error reporting capability to .NET WinForms applications by displaying detailed information about an Exception (message, sysinfo,...

If you are looking to get started with programming, you will probably hear many different language suggestions as which one is the ‘best’ one to start with. While most people will probably say Java, I believe Visual Basic .Net is the better alternative. Regardless of which tool you start with, a full programming language can be intimidating because...

OK, time to get a bit more technical. In order to customize your WordPress theme, you will need to understand enough PHP to do a few basic things. WordPress (and the themes it uses) are entirely based on the PHP scripting language. In this video, I will show you some basic PHP – concentrating on those concepts you’ll need most often in your WordPress...

If you’re administering your own web pages (or possibly WordPress themes,) it’s more or less required to know Cascading Style Sheets, a.k.a. CSS for short. In the video below I give a very basic tutorial on how to adjust font styles using...

I must admit when I read this headline, I was thinking "About Frickin’ Time!". Windows is a bloated mess (as Vista proved) and I have been of the opinion for awhile now that Microsoft needs to get back to basics and stop trying to simply build more crap onto an already huge pile. But, let’s not get too excited quite yet. Microsoft’s...