In life there are a lot of things that we must take as a given but are difficult to prove. The best we can do is take a position where the evidence leads and operate as if it is true. The problem is that those things that we consider as assumptions, because you have to have a starting point, escalate […]

How important is the protection of your data? What would happen to your business if something happened to your data? Is this a key consideration in your system designs, or simply an afterthought when you have time to get around to it? When I am thinking of data protection there are a lot of factors to be considered. The first […]

Here’s a little C# technique that can save you time when you passing an undefined set of data from one method to another. This may be a newbee kind of thing. But, if you haven’t come across it yet, it can be very handy. Let me start out with an example problem. Have you ever used the string.Format method in […]

One of the most difficult kinds of software I have worked on is where you use data to define or logic. One kind of program you could write uses meta-data stored in a relational database to write and execute SQL code based on what it finds. I once created a stored procedure that would identify the structure of a table […]

I recently found myself going back to Old School techniques for SQL Server Reporting Services. A colleague of mine was working with a report using a user entered multi-select option as a filter for the report. I was surprised to find how reporting services translated the input into a query to retrieve the data from SQL Server. The report had […]

As an IT Professional it can help to brand yourself when it comes to demonstrating your worth to your current employer or a potential client/employer. Often this is done through blogging or by adding content to different forums or newsletters. I recently received a request from an individual wishing to submit content to SSWUG.org for publishing. I think this is […]

Aaron, from Data Specialists, finds the question, “Can my software be tested?” to be valuable in their product line. Aaron writes in response to the editorial "A Question to Improve Your Code": I am in 100% agreement with you on the impact testing has had on the quality of the code I write. In fact a current college student interviewed […]

Is it testable? That single question has impacted my software writing more than just about any other software development strategy. If the tests are automated it is even more important to me. The impact of writing testable code has many facets: If you want to write automated tests efficiently you have to keep the testable methods simple in order to […]

Too many times when things don’t work the way we want them to we “Fix the Symptoms, not the cause”. Usually the symptom is slow performance. Today I’ll share a few war stories. One application I designed was used to manage funds and the fund distributions. The database was nicely normalized. I had a user that wanted to see everything […]

Over-engineering is always a possibility in any application. In the last few months I have seen a number of different examples of over-engineering. I find it interesting that they all have one thing in common. The application had poor performance and therefore wouldn’t scale to handle the load. Instead of addressing the core cause the systems were resolved using a […]