The race to the bottom

$10 an hour?  For a consultant. Really??

That’s £6.28 at today’s exchange rate.

UK National Minimum wage is £6.31 per hour.

How much do you value your business? I mean if it is not that important to you then great!

Asp.net mvc4 course

Jon Galloway – free ASP.NET MVC4 course

Online university courses

FutureLearn provides free online courses from UK Universities.
This one looks like a fun starter course for programmers who want to get into mobile games.

Game dev resources

A nice list of game development resources from Simon Jackson, Darkside. Something like the hanselman list, but for games development.

MVC cascading deletes

How to handle cascading deletes in Entity Framework

MVC links

MS Certifications: “Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications”

Useful training resources: Microsoft Application Architecture Guide

Also: a free training event

MVC scaffolding

This seems to be a tidier way to add scafolding to your MVC projects.

Thirty days of TDD

30 days of Test Driven Development by James Bender, Telerik

Please hack someone else

Troy Hunt has an interesting course on Pluralsight and a novel way of marketing it, with a public web site you are invited to hack.

Useful blogs

Scott Guthrie on Azure improvements

The Official Windows Azure blog

Entity framework home page

ADO.NET blog

Julie Lerman’s Programming Entity Framework blog

Online magazines

Two Online free .Net magazines…
.NET Curry
&
MSDN Magazine September

Game development stack

This is an unusual approach... http://pedro-ramirez-suarez.github.io/cloudwarsgame/

Links

Here’s a link for all those people who want you to “just write a vbscript…”
Getting started with Powershell

And for more advanced scripts…

Entity Framework
Entity Framework 6 Release Candidate is available… Includes a list of what’s new in this version of the framework and a link to guidance on Updating Applications to use EF6

This is a reminder for me to watch Scott Hanselman's video from Build : What’s New in ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2013

Configuring Relationships with the Fluent API

Reminder to self to look at the MSDN Magazine June Issue when it comes out.
  Windows Azure Insider gets you up to speed on concepts and principles behind multi-tenant applications...

A useful web developer tool from Google.

Get Mobile

It allows you to test and score a web-site on its mobile readiness. This blog score's 6 out of 6, which is all donwn to Google. The last web-site I built (some years ago) only scores 2 out of 6. An indication of how the times keep changing.

CSS links:

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time.

W3C CSS Validator

Minify your CSS

Zen Garden

An excellent site for 3D tutorials, AeroTwist

I had heard of Microsoft BizSpark before but never really looked into it. It is surprising to see how many entrepreneurs have been supported by it.

There is an interactive map showing companies set up by people on the programme which is fun to browse around. Some of the companies look to have been going for a while, others have not got going yet.

More about BizSpark