Technology

Introduction

Most of our web development work is carried out using the Microsoft suite of products.  We use industry best-practice coding standards & patterns wherever possible.  In addition, we make pragmatic use of third-party & open-source technologies.

Listed below are the main products & techniques we use.  Most projects require some new or unique technical elements to be addressed, so if you do not see exactly what you want, please ask - we may already be learning about it or know someone we can recommend.

Server-side coding

Whenever we build websites that require interaction with a database, we use Microsoft's .NET Framework.  This includes many different technologies under its umbrella:-
 
All our server-side scripting (programming) is done using C# (sorry VB.NET programmers).

Database access can be done a number of ways. Our current favourite for interacting with more complex models is Entity Framework Code First (including LINQ to Entities).  We can also use its simpler cousin LINQ to SQL, or a non-Microsoft ORM (Object Relational Mapper).

Most of our web application development is based on Microsoft's Model View Controller (MVC) Framework for structuring the application.  This is built with clear separation of concerns between the "M", "V" and "C" giving a clean architecture & the ability to build automated unit tests for the functionality.

Alternatively we can also work with ASP.NET web-forms technology (which is how the Kentico CMS content management system we use is built).

Client-side coding

HTML pages are constructed using various techniques and libraries to ensure cross-browser compatibility and, where required, cross-platform compatibility.

We use JavaScript, jQuery and AJAX for responsive and interactive applications and make use of a range of third-party JavaScript libraries for specific requirements (eg Knockout.js).

Server (hosting) infrastructure

Our applications typically use Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Services) and SQL Server.

Coding principles & practices

When we design and build an application, we try to follow best-practices to create well-structured code that is easy to test, understand and maintain.

We strive to use industry standards and in particular those published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).