I've been really surprised by the replies you have to this. I don't want to get into the debate of which is better, simple answer to me is they both have good and bad points. What is more relevant here is what you are doing with your client. The first question has to be: Do you have incredibly specific knowledge of your clients business that cannot easily be learnt by someone else? If the answer to that question is yes, then it is possibly worthwhile them paying for you to learn PHP - business knowledge and understanding can be very hard to pick up. I am going to assume that this is not the case - it doesn't sound like you have a history with the client so it is unlikely. So why shouldn't you try and convince them to do it in ASP.NET and SQL Server. Well firstly they may not even own a server that runs Windows - so there is some fair cost involved for them to get it - and they almost definitely won't have licences for SQL Server, which are expensive. I know you can use SQL Express but I am assuming this project is bigger than that. Then they probably have no one that can administer it, make future changes etc. Now you could offer to host it and have a maintenance contract etc (residual income is always nice) but if they were happy with that they wouldn't care what you wrote the system in and you wouldn't be asking this question. So why shouldn't you learn PHP? Well firstly AndyInUK implies you are in the UK. For whatever reasons .NET is completely dominant in the UK and learning PHP will offer you few benefits in terms of future work. Yes PHP projects exist and you might get one in the future because of this experience, but there are less of them and they generally pay less, so the benefits are negligible (I'm not saying this to start some sort of flame war, this is just my personal opinion from my 11 years of freelancing and contracting in the London market). Second reason not to learn PHP is the time it will take you to do so. Lets say you want the client, because lets face it turning down money is very hard to do. So what is this project worth in terms of development time. 500 hours in .NET? So to learn a whole new language, get a development machine up and running, understand how all the pieces piece together, work out which is the best IDE etc etc etc is going to add a lot of time. Weeks in fact. So your 500 hour project is going to turn into 750 hours. Which your client is not going to want to pay for. If you started hunting around for another client and spent 250 hours on it do you think you c

I'm a kiwi that has spent the last 11 years in London, accumulated a wife, a house and two kids - we are in the process of making a decision on whether to make a move back to New Zealand. First tip I'd give you is to think long and hard as to whether you want to bring up your kid(s if there are more to come) without grandparents, cousins etc. For men this is generally easy, but I think most women miss family more, and my kids talk about family a lot (4 & 6). Also whilst it is normally easy enough to find a babysitter so you can go out, family offer the ability to get rid of the kids for a night or two, or during the day when you want to go and buy tiles at homebase etc - 4 year olds and hardware stores do not go well together. In 6 years my wife and I have had 2 nights away from the kids. Don't forget it is expensive for family to get to Australia, and against income, even more expensive for you to get back to England - on a normal salary it is not something you will be doing once a year (and as your child approaches school age the school holidays are the most expensive time to travel, and the only long one is Christmas / January - not the best time to have to visit England). So my number one tip would be to really explore that your family is willing to make that jump. From what I have looked at, the software development industry in Australia and New Zealand is different to the UK. There are not as many large firms that have dedicated IT departments and development teams. There are a lot more small businesses. Saying that, looking at your profile, you've come from hardware and have broad experience with loads of different development languages. Small quiet places (never been to Gold Coast but has a sleepy reputation) tend to need people that are flexible with what they can do, there are probably more opportunities for someone that can come in and be a bit of a jack of all trades, than for someone that would only describe themselves as a hardcore XYZ hacker. If you are flexible and really want to move you'll find a way to feed that family without too many problems. These countries are still lands of opportunity. Last tip is to really research what you are getting into, if you haven't been out there definitely do that before you up sticks. Houses are much cheaper than in the UK, but then incomes are much less, and at the moment the exchange rate sucks, so any pounds you can take wont go far (wait a year or two I think). If you live in a three bed terrace here I probably wouldn't expect to be moving to a five be

Around 10 years ago the department I was working for (in a very large company) needed a simplified issue tracking system. They liked the idea of Remedy but didn't have budget to buy it (capex freeze - you've got to love the way companies work) so got me to write it instead. Son Of REmedy Did a logo with a bandaid on it and everything. SORE went into production, doubt it still is though.

Hi, maybe you don't need a career change at all - maybe just a change to a smaller firm. Sometimes when you work on a big team you can get very stuck in one area, and you tend to be developing very critical applications that do require you to make the absolute most out of the framework etc - 1 second loading time makes a big difference each day if you have 10,000 users etc etc. Often when you work for a smaller firm you get to do the full lifecycle of development - the analysis, the design, the project management, the development, the testing (it couldn't all be good), then the user training and delivery. How well the software scales, whether or not you can change the database from SQL to MySQL to Oracle all in two days, whether it uses the 2.0 Framework or 3.0 or 3.5 generally doesn't matter. I find it gives you a sense of ownership, you get to work closely with the users, you get to truly see what they are working on etc. In terms of other related careers some software people are good at looking at business processes and helping redefine them, that sort of thing can be interesting - but you really need to find someone who will take you under your wing to achieve a career change like that. Most things are going to require you to start from scratch and if you are going to do that you might as well try something you think you will love. Personally I'd love to leave the software industry and maybe do something wine related - but it aint going to pay my mortgage or kids school fees so for now it is a no go. Andrew

Hi I've been using bugtracker.net on various projects at various companies for the last 3 years or so. It is easy to set-up, fairly easy to make changes to and overall I would recommend it, especially at the price. The main negatives I have found are you certainly wouldn't want "clients" to see it because it is not pretty, and if you want to use it to track multiple projects I don't think it really supports having specific attributes for each project so some of your dropdown's end up with unnecessary values in them. But assuming you are a .net developer it is a good way to go. Andrew

If it was me I would give them the list of sites that people here have mentioned, and then stay well away. It is very hard to find good developers, and even harder to find ones that are good at doing small jobs. An hour long meeting (maybe on the phone) creating two days or so of work that gets done over a weekend and delivered on Monday morning etc is a very difficult project type, and takes the right kind of person to deliver it. Often you end up with the client expecting more than what is delivered etc. Then they expect free support for the next ten years. By the time you go through all this with the client beforehand you'd have used half the budget to start with. Personally I've done a number of these types of projects, most have gone OK, but 75% of them are after another developer has tried and failed. If you recommend someone that is always going to reflect on you. If you say this is a difficult thing to do and give them the sites then you've certainly done your bit to help and if it alls goes wrong you shouldn't end up looking bad.

Hi. It looks like you have received lots of advice here, some good, some bad. As someone that has been doing a combination of freelancing (random clients for days through to years) and contracting (where I am onsite for months at a time) for the past 18 years I thought I would add my 2 cents. The first (and I think most important) thing that I would say that I don't think anyone else has said, is do you have a specialist area? I wouldn't really consider developing websites a specialist area, there are millions of people who do that. But if you have worked with a particular market previously then that is often a good market to keep working with. If you have developed a website for say a real estate agent then it is going to be a lot easier to get another real estate client than to get say a dentist. Make sure your previous clients know you are looking for work, it would be unusual for a previous client not to know others in their field that can be your future clients. Very easy for someone to go "Your website is good, who did that for you" and then you have a potential new client. In terms of meeting people I would be very impressed with anyone that goes to conferences and walks away with clients. That is hard work networking. However going to a local business meeting (Business Link, Chamber of Commerce - I've worked in four or five countries and they all have something), and then going a few times and making friends with people is easy, and much easier to convert into business. Once people there know what you do they will be interested in using you. Part of this is also that people are very lazy. I have seen people walked off company sites for gross negligence and then turn up again a week later because the boss didn't know (ie couldn't be bothered) anyone else to call. I wouldn't worry about your own website too much, most people will never look past the first few words. If you really want to pull random surfers you need something more eye catching, anyone else I cannot believe will read it. Also don't push terms like PHP, Hosting, Marketing and SEO. People want a website, you can introduce them to all those terms (and make money from implementing them) afterwards, most people don't have a clue what they mean. I like to think of clients as being like my dad - they know what they need it to do, but that is about the end of it, don't confuse them before you've started I could keep writing for hours on this, but this is already quite a long post, so my last piece of advice would be to think seriously abou

I've been using BugTracker.NET for a year or so now, at two different companies. It isn't very slick, the colour scheme is awful, design is pretty messy. For for a team of 4-6 developers, a couple of testers, BA's and PM's it works OK. Especially considering the price (free). Takes about 10 minutes to setup if you have MS SQL and an available IIS server. It is easy to make a few modifications if you need them, although once you start that you get a desire to rewrite the entire thing :-) So personally I would recommend it, because it is easy to install, easy enough to use, does most things I can think you would want a bug tracking piece of software to do, and because it is free you don't need to justify the price to managers etc - which always seems to take a while. Good luck Andrew

Europe is a big place, many people make the mistake of trying to see too much in a short time, which means they really end up seeing nothing. The first time I went to Europe (I know live in Europe, but travelled from New Zealand when I was younger), I went for three weeks and got a good taste. Trying to do more than one country in two weeks would be a bit of a waste. You should be able to get an airfare that arrives in one city and departs another without too much cost difference. Personally I would recommend flying to Milan in Italy, spend a day or two there. Catch a train to Venice - very easy and about 2 hours. Spend 2-3 days there (if budget is an issue stay in Mestre which is just outside Venice and a 10 minute train journey - much cheaper). Catch a train to Florence and spend 4-5 days there, maybe more. Look at day trips to Sienna and San Gimignano. The Tuscan countryside is beautiful. Then catch the train to Rome and have a couple of days there, fly out of Rome. That would be a reasonable Italian holiday. You could do similar in Spain, France or Germany but in Italy you get to see a lot without having to do huge mileage - the distances are a bit more in other countries. Netherland, Belgium etc in my opinion are not as scenic, and much smaller - but they have nice things as well. Enjoy!

I have a 19" monitor at home office which is nicer to work on than a 17", but not that great. At work I use a 17" laptop with 1920x1200 resolution. This is a fantastic resolution to work with, and I really want to buy a 24" screen for home to get the same resolution on my desktop. In a recent job I used a two monitor set-up for the first time. I had always doubted how much use it would be, but to be honest it was amazing. To me there was a huge productivity increase - especially if you develop websites - one screen with code, one with screen. Is much easier than I imagined to mouse between screens etc. So whatever you do, save your 17" and hook that up as a 2nd screen.

I've got two :-) I live in London and a German agency contacted me for a job in Connecticut - which is a little odd in the first place. Anyway the company interviewed me, quite a technical interview, and it was an ASP and SQL Server role which is what I did at the time. So I get the job, pack up my flat and move to the US. Turn up on day one and it turns out the job is a VB and Oracle job. I'd never really used much VB and never touched Oracle. They then gave me my first project which was supposed to take a week, but they would understand if it took longer. It took 5 hours. I lasted 4 weeks and then quit, soon after their backers quit too and they no longer exist. My first ever London job interview was with a well known tv & movie company. I did the interview and got on well with the guy interviewing, but unfortunately the role was too junior. He decided that I would get bored and not stick it out. The thing is the job was £15,000 more than I was expecting, I was 26 and single, the office was 90% female, and it appeared that instead of using a recuitment agency they used a modelling agency - it would have been a job for life!!;P Andrew