Another practice of professionalism Uncle Bob Martin spoke of was Being Honest. He spoke of honesty on two levels, at least that was the way I heard it said. First, be honest to yourself. Never commit code to the application before it is completed. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you are speed things up by checking in un-tested code. Be […]

Continuing with our topic of software professionalism, ala Uncle Bob Martin, we are going to consider the practice of Fearless Coding. While I am writing from personal experience in this matter, I am drawing from Uncle Bob’s packaging of many different principles. Some of them can be found at this presentation on YouTube, should you wish to dig further. This […]

I had the opportunity to hear Uncle Bob Martin as the keynote speaker, talking about the history of software programming over the years, comparing it to other professional practices. The entire presentation was thought provoking. I thought I would pass on a few points from his presentation that made an impact on me. First, Uncle Bob compared the computer programming […]

Today I had an experienced come to me with a problem working with dates in an SQL Server database. They were saving image files, and storing the date based in the date of the file in the file system. If a new image was saved in the file system with the same name, the system would know it was updated […]

Tuples are one of my favorite Dot Net constructs. I don’t use them much; but when I need a simple complex data type, and don’t want to go through the trouble of creating a new Class or Struct, a Tuple can be quite handy. A tuple is a generic class and can be defined by declaring each of the attributes […]

I remember attending the Debut of Dot Net back in the late ‘90s, attending a presentation in Indianapolis, IN, USA. They made a statement at the time I have not forgotten. I didn’t quite believe, or understand it. But it stuck with me. “Microsoft believes the future for software is going to be software as a service, not software as […]

Documentation is essential for any computer system. It doesn’t matter if you are purchasing a product off the shelf, or write custom software. There are many decisions that have been made to make the software and hardware work. Those decisions are best maintained when the appropriate level of documentation is created and maintained. If you have followed me for any […]

Can big business go to the Cloud? Unless I am mistaken, the only way many big companies are going to make it into the cloud is when their survival depends on it. Maybe even then it may not happen. Large organizations are entrenched in ideas and methodologies that have been proven for years. They often have huge investments in software […]

There are a few data design patterns that are easy to get hooked on because of their flexibility. Like any tool, the value diminishes if it is used incorrectly, or where not needed. Here are some of my favorites that have a place in database design; just not all of the time. EAV – EAV stands for Entity Attribute Values. […]

In my recent research I came across the term MEAN web development. Ok, nice name; now I’m interested. Reading on, I found that MEAN is an acronym for a tool set used to do rapid, economical web development. Data is persisted using Mongo db. Since Mongo is available as open systems software you can deploy it for little or no […]