Where have I been?

Finally back on the blogging scene.  A lot has happened in the last 6 months and now that things are settling down I finally have a chance to start putting some content on my blog.

First, a little about me.  My name is Ron Buckton and I am a Senior Consultant for Microsoft Services in the Federal District, Public Sector.  What this means is that I work primarily with Public Sector government contracts for MCS.  I started with Microsoft back in May after a number of interviews and trips back and forth to Redmond, WA and Washington, DC.  Prior to joining Microsoft I was working for a Microsoft partner in Cleveland, OH where I previously did most of my blogging.

Back in 2006 I joined the Ajax Control Toolkit as a contributor and among my contributions number the Calendar, Tabs, DropDown, and a number of other smaller extenders and numerous architectural features within the toolkit such as ScriptControl and ScriptUserControl.  I had a number of useful blog posts about the toolkit on my former blog but unfortunately the blog was taken down shortly after I left and I have yet to have the time to pull those posts out of my archives to republish here.

A number of people on the ASP.Net forums have been asking for me to republish the content in some form, specifically the posts revolving around skinning the Calendar and Tabs controls using CSS.  I plan on having those posts cleaned up and published as articles on this blog before too much longer.

Aside from the Toolkit and my original ASP.Net development focus I am now very heavily involved in mobile device development.  As a result you'll see a fair amount of mobility content in addition to some of my other favorite topics.

Other than this introductory post I'll try to keep the signal very high and the content coming as frequently as I can. Here's what to expect in the coming weeks assuming I can find the time between a heavy workload, family, and other obligations:

  • Ajax
    • Skinning Calendar and Tabs (redux)
    • Upcoming Calendar and Tabs bugfixes and enhancements
    • My mile-long wishlist of control/extender ideas after I get my bug-count down
    • Ajax unit testing
  • Mobile
    • Mobile UI wizardry
    • BackgroundWorker for Compact Framework
    • Mobile unit testing with Visual Studio 2008
  • Workflow
  • WPF
  • Silverlight

If any of this interests you, subscribe and comment. Until then, happy coding.