Like many who have an O365 account, I have access to Copilot with work so I use it quite a lot. It remains the most frustrating of all the AI tools despite the obvious huge investment. Claude Code is excellent for developing with. Gemini isn't as good but still solid. Copilot just struggles to produce output I can trust. I've had a number of cases of Copilot imagining nuget packages that don't exist and struggles with using current documentation for things.

If you just vibe everything AI tools can produce some real filth... it's important to ignore some of the wild claims on social media as it's more about capturing likes than making realistic claims. I'm taking a more realistic approach and just constantly refining how I use the different tools to make me more efficient. Two great recent examples: Bug investigation - I had a quirky bug and honestly Claude couldn't magically solve it with limited context.

Following on from the last post, I've been playing with WinForms a little today. I've been trying to create a utility to automate a few things I do often. Naturally, I've probably spent more time on the utility than I'll actually save but that's what all good developers do! Out of the box, WinForms always looks a bit "meh". After using Gemini to knock up v1 I'd hit my Pro model usage for the day so decided to swap over to Claude Code to see how it could help.

My dev process has certainly adapted to make use of AI. Within ProtoFlex we are a small team so it makes sense to use any tool that boosts productivity. I've had some great results with Claude Code & am starting to test out the Gemini CLI on odd tasks. Both have the ability to impress when producing mock-ups but I'm still concerned about code quality when it comes to taking mock-ups and developing code that will be used in production.

Patient engagement isn't "one-size-fits-all". So why is your software? A patient-led feedback loop only works if it reflects the specific condition being treated and the local protocols of the clinic...

Racket Mate is a free log/score keeper/game recorder that tracks the results of a regular squash/racketball match between you and your friends. Build some leagues and keep track of who wins the most i...

A bit later than planned but time for a quick review of last year. Modernising Healthcare Pathways Naturally the major focus for this year has been ProtoFlex, our digital pathways platform. I've spent a lot of 2025 with further platform development and expanding the module features to better support integration with other systems as well as tidy up the UI around some of the back-end design tools to make it easier for our design consultants to work with.

Cloud platforms sell us a beautiful idea: infinite scale at the click of a button. But anyone who has tried to push Azure a little harder - especially in busy regions - knows the reality can be far less magical. Capacity limits and regional constraints mean your quotas aren’t just numbers on a dashboard. They’re hard ceilings backed by physical hardware availability.

Pre-Christmas I'd rather be on leave already or at least working on some simpler tasks or even doing a bit of CPD or R&D but not this year - today has been a real hard slog to get a feature working but I'm really happy to have seen it succeed. I have a need to process data server side through some SurveyJS forms which is not too tricky in itself but...

I’ve had an idea for a while that I’ve never progressed but this year I’m committing to getting the MVP done. More info once the sign up site is working but it’s hopefully going to be a great little app for families.

I've pushed v1 of a quick project I've been playing with which is a template/starter for creating a SaaS in Razor Pages. There's lots of samples that show SaaS based on JavaScript frameworks but I always struggled to find anything that was .NET based on tackled multi-tenant, billing and allowing users to map to multiple organisations. There's a definite lack of samples in Razor Pages as many have gone down the Blazor route.

After experimenting with various chat interfaces I've finally got around to testing Claude Code. I'm mainly working on Windows and full fat Visual Studio so I'm using Claude Code in a PowerShell terminal and VS open along side. It's working really well without needing an extension in VS. I'm quite happy just having the two different interfaces open. Claude Code is really quite a different experience to throwing ideas around with the usual chat interfaces.

Next in my queue of apps to get a refresh is the BigBoard. I've not done a lot with it recently as it's pretty simple and does what I need - that is, present a year & monthly breakdown of my training mileage across each activity I do. Strava is great for tracking current activity and goals but doesn't quite offer the historical analysis I'm interested in.

Upgrading an old app to .NET 10 last night and I moved the DB connection string to a secrets file. When I came to debug it just wouldn't load - what's the issue? It's a tricky one as the set-up all looked right. I had Copilot double check to be sure it wasn't a daft typo! Copilot could see nothing wrong so it took some digging.

I've opened up an old project - untouched in a while and last edited in VS2022. When I open it VS2026 gets stuck in a loop of endless restore cycles. The NuGet UI also stuck in a loading loop so I can't see anything. I tried manually updating packages in the proj file - it builds and runs but still sits running restores.