RackSpace Reports

For those of you who make use of RackSpace for your web hosting, you may notice there is no option to get full reports on every Domain you have with them, let alone the Sub-Domains, nor where they are all pointing. If you want that type of information, you have to manually view each page, one by one.

I was put in charge of creating a Web Audit, as the company I work for own over 260 domains, numerous servers with RackSpace, and going through all of that one by one could prove daunting, and could take anything up to a couple days to complete.

Being the type of the person that I am, I wrote a small command line application in C#, which logs into our RackSpace account, navigates to the relevant web pages, and then strips the HTML for all the information we needed to do our audit. I plan on releasing the source code for this (after a bit of cleaning up, as it was very quickly thrown together), so that others may make use of it, or even alter it to gather additional information from other sections of their RackSpace administration panel.

Big Update

It's been quite a while since I've made a blog post, I haven't forgot about my blog, however I have been constantly busy with numerous other things! I am finally starting to get everything organised, so updates should start to become a bit more regular (finally!).

So let's update some of the projects I currently have running, and their status:

• CartoLogix for Windows [ on hold ]
• CartoLogix for Web [ re-drafting ]
• W3R File Parser/Blogger [ in progress ]
• XNA RTS Game [ in progress ]
• .NET MVC Forum Software [ drafting ]
• Developing Your Own Diagram Software Book [ in progress ]

I also have two long term development projects, which unfortunately are confidential, so I am unable to mention  details of their development until completion.

CartoLogix for Windows is currently on hold, as I am in the process of converting it into a book describing how to develop your own Diagram Software in C#. I have not yet tried to find a publisher for the book, as I first want to complete a couple major chapters which I think would be beneficial for the publishing companies to give me a fair judgement, on whether they will publish my work or not.

CartoLogix for Web, the original project, which took me a lot of time to develop, I have decided to re-draft, as I am sure I can re-develop all of the existing features to be faster and more stable than they are at present. I also believe that I can do all of this in a mere fraction of the original development time, with a few tricks I have learned over the past year. I'll be posting updates on the project progress in future blog posts.

W3R File Parser/Blogger, is a small project I have undertaken. I was asked to create a plugin for WordPress, which allows the user to upload a W3R file, which will first be parsed for information, and then uploaded to a public FTP. The parsed information and Link to the file will be automatically posted into a new blog post, and blog formatting options will also be available.

XNA RTS Game, a Real Time Strategy game I am currently developing with Microsoft's XNA Framework. I have a full development team on this project, of which, I am the lead programmer. I will be making use of the Lua Scripting language for this project, and releasing the game on the Xbox 360 Marketplace.

.NET MVC Forum Software, something I have wanted to do for ages is write my own Forum Software, a good software package, which is written in .NET, offers a lot of flexability, ease of use, stability, and it best of all, open source (free to use).

That covers pretty much everything that is going on at the moment, I also need to redesign my homepage at some point, as the scale of work I am now undertaking has come to be a bit too much for the current design to handle.

Progression

Once more, I am delayed in actually making blog posts, as I have been ever so busy with numerous different things. Let us go through a summary of what I have been up to since my last blog post..

I have been enrolled onto more training courses, learned a lot more useful functionality in the .NET 3.5 framework, increased my production rate with use of a lovely tool called ReSharper, saved my work a fair chunk of money in server costs by identifying some unrequired hardware and migrating some architechure around. Another bit of good news is that I have finally booked my driving test for my car, and on that topic, today upgraded the speakers in my Land Rover to a much better system. I also was asked to join a 4x4 club by a lovely young lady at my local music store when I went in to buy some new headphones.

So to the most part, everything is going very well, I have signed up to the Gym with a personal trainer, managed to put on nearly a stone of muscle, feeling much healthier, and I also upgraded my home network to N1.

The next thing I want to try do is take on a few more freelance projects, as I now feel I have a good grip over my day job, and what I do there has dramatically increased my productivity levels, not only from having worked with professionals/contractors who are specialists in their own fields, but also from all the learning material and time I am given to further my own development. I would love to take a vacation later this year, so the extra money would be great to help me pay off the credit card before I head off.

I am sure that it will be probably another month before I actually post here again, but most likely there will be some even more interesting things for me to share.

Learning Curve

Well I have been working for William Reed for nearly a month now, and I must say I am loving it! I am learning so much, getting to play around with all the tech and such that I normally only get to mess around with in my free time, and get to speak to people who actually know what they are talking about!

So far, I have learned jQuery (I used to be highly proficient in JavaScript, but now I can code even more, in less time), even wrote my own jQUery Plugin. I have also been learning LINQ, MVC, nHibernate, Resharper, and a few other bits. I am to also learn ENDECA very soon, which looks like a very interesting item to work with.

I am already making good use of all this knowledge, as they keep giving me small projects to try out, while they train me up.

New job aside, I have decided to write some User Controls of my own, as I have tried out many different controls (commercial and open source) and none of them do exactly what I would like them to do. Some offer a lot of features I like, but then they have hidden problems. So I have decided to develop my own, which I would have better control over. I may even publish them if I feel they are good enough.

Silverlight Clouds

Once again, I have been really busy with numerous different things. I have been teaching myself Microsoft Silverlight, reading a bit more into AJAX for ASP.NET, as well as playing around with a few other languages. As an experiment, I have started to convert CartoLogix into Silverlight, as I have a feeling it would run much better as a Silverlight application, if it is intended for use over the web.

I am also going to be starting a new job at William Reed Business Media, as a Junior Online Solutions Developer. I am looking forward to playing around with all the new ideas and new technology they work with, which will include Microsoft Silverlight.

When I get a bit more time, I will do a bit more of a global update on everything on this website, but unfortunately I have been away either working or travelling.

Nearing Completion

Unfortunately I have been busy with a lot of other work which takes precidence over me completing this website. However I am now slowly finishing it all off, I`ve just about finished the Home page, and Blog, just need to make a few tweaks. I need to sit down with my friend who is a technical writer to sort out the Products and Portfolio sections, and I should hopefully have the Contact form completed today at some point.

After I`ve finished up the frontend, I can whip up a nice little CMS for myself, as my previous CMS, I wrote in PHP, and this new website runs purely on ASP.NET. I`m trying to make best use of all the functionality of .NET - so far I`ve done MasterPages, and a few Server Controls, however I think for the CMS I will make a few custom usercontrols.

A Fresh Start

New hosting package, and new blog, so I guess I need to give a bit of a rundown about myself.

My name is Justin Nel, I'm a software developer, but I also dabble in graphic design. I've been programming for 10 years now, originally started as a hobby, and then turned into a career. Well versed in a number of programming languages, the following are the list of languages, I am most commonly found using today:

• ASP.NET
• C# (Windows Forms, Web Applications, ActiveX/UserControls)
• C++ (Windows Forms, DirectX Media Applications)
• JavaScript (Including AJAX)
• PHP

At my dayjob, I've only recently started to do software development (the previous 3-4 years, I've been doing Database Design/Data Manipulation), but for the last 6 years I have done a lot of different freelance jobs, for numerous different clients, a summary of the projects include:

• Website Content Management System Design and Implimentation (XHTML/AJAX/PHP/MySQL)
• Database Content Management System Design and Implementation (C#/XML/MSSQL)
• ActiveX/UserControl Design and Implementation (C#/XHTML/AJAX/XML/MSSQL)

I'm currently designing a couple of software applications which should appear on the website in the near future.

As and when I have more to say about applications I am developing, or anything in general, I'll post it up here on the blog.