Industry Best Practice

This site covers much of the technical and management stuff concerned with doing IT projects right and on budget. It does not contain too much 'text book' information. Any that is given is the distilled essence of the information. 

This site contains lots of hints and advice on all aspects of development. It is  based on my personal experience as a developer and team leader working in the industry for over a decade.  

This site currently contains a lot of information about VB6 software development. This will be refreshed with information about C# and Vb.Net and of course ASP.Net

Currently C# seems to be winning the language wars. Microsoft have provided a richer development environment for C# when compared with VB.Net and C# seems to be adopted by and encourage people with a certain more formal mindset.

ASP.Net has transformed the way that websites are built and finally allowed high quality maintainable code to be written as standard.

Done well VB.Net and VB6  are both productive languages that can be used to write good quality high performance applications which are easy to maintain. All that is needed is the discipline to do things properly. Anyone who has come from a Mainframe background will probably already have this discipline beaten into them.

Done badly - sadly in too many companies - it can create code that is unmaintainable, unreadable, runs slowly and is buggy.

It is up to you which way you do it - Honest!

These pages cover all the important aspects of doing it right - starting with the logical stuff, moving on to physical design. It then moves on to testing strategies, fun with people and finally some ideas for making maintenance easier.

You may not believe it but it is a lot FASTER to do things right the first time. So-called short-cuts such as starting coding too early will just cause big problems. Unfortunately thinking is not a recognized office task. Dealing with this and other issues is covered in the People section.