My Career

I began very early, like many others in the computer industry. I learned to write batch files, QBASIC code, repair computers, set up small networks and became interested in learning anything I could about computers. I ran a bulletin board system (BBS) and was a hub for FidoNet before the internet was…

Running the Microsoft .NET Stack on a Fresh MacBook Pro

Learning Knockout JS — Crazy Mom Baby Tracker Demo

I’m thrilled to be able to report my wife and I had our second daughter on May 8th, 2012. Vanessa was 7 pounds even and very healthy. Due to the birth, I took a few days off of work to help out (in many ways, I think I was more work for my…

Conway’s Game of Life in Angular.js

I know there are a lot of posts for Angular, so I will spare everyone a rehash of setup and Hello World. Instead, I thought it would be fun to show a simple example of Angular recreating Conway’s Game of Life.

Book Review — Head First Object Oriented Analysis and Design

Testing Web Services with SoapUI

Web services are great aren’t they? You can easily link Java code, .NET code, and even many more obscure languages together with some type of XML-based web service. However, working with all of these different sources of code can be a little concerning as bug tracking and…

Paralysis Analysis and the Paradox of Choice

I am at the point where I visibly cringe at the mere mention of corporate buzzwords such as “paralysis analysis”, “single source of truth”, or “low hanging fruit”. However, all of these phrases are rooted in tried and true explanations of important and…

Resetting your defaults

My blog at nicholasbarger.com pretty much died. It had a decent run from 2008–2013, but then a sudden death. I stopped writing, forgot about controlling all of the SPAM comments, and even forgot to update my credit card which subsequently caused my custom css theme to disappear.

Microsoft vs. Linux, ASP.NET vs. PHP

This is a very popular question that comes up, especially when you are first starting to choose your path in development. I believe you really can’t go wrong with which route you choose but it does help to know some basic guidelines when deciding whether to pursue…