On The Fence Development

In my current contract I needed to add date filtering to a grid of search results in and MVC view - how hard could it be?

One of the things I love about working as a contractor is getting exposure to technologies, tools and utilities that will improve my coding and help me produce better code - geeky but true.

My most recent contract is no exception and this time I've decided to share this little gem of an extension which will remove those pesky literal string from your MVC Views.

Any developer who has worked with MVC will have written code similar to the following:

So it's New Years Eve and looking back at the last year I'm pretty happy with how it's gone.

Since deciding to leave the rat race that is permanent employment in favor of contracting I not been out of work for long and the short time between contracts has been useful for getting up to speed with new techniques and technologies. Nobody can know it all, it's just not possible, so I carefully pick my fights in terms of what I invest time in learning.

This year I intend to focus on a handful of technologies:

I've been contracting for about a year now and this has meant that I've had numerous dealings with recruiters and recruitment agencies. While I've been quite successful in obtaining contracts I'm afraid that my opinion of many recruiters (not necessarily the agencies themselves) is that they do not provide any value to the process, indeed the detract from it.