Code Smells is a term I picked up from the Agile Community. The term applies to any custom software system regardless of SDLC. I have heard it described as code that can be improved. Reasons I have seen for code improvement may be: Readability Maintainability Streamlining Optimizing Applying a Pattern Simplifying Applying Development Standards Fixing Errors The primary reason it […]

It’s pretty hard to run a business without accruing some form of technical debt. Technical debt is easily described as that shortcut you took to solve some software problem with the thought that you’d come back and fix it sometime in the future. This is a very common, and in my opinion, a very appropriate action. It is like paying […]

Recently I have been looking at certifications again. The last certification I had was for a Microsoft Certified Software Developer back in the early 2000s using SQL Server 2000 as a base. I haven’t needed a certification to land work; nobody has asked or cared. Moreover, some of the certifications back then were simply a measurement of how good your […]

If you were restricted to only the Microsoft enabled software where would you be? Would you be restricted to SQL Server, Azure SQL Server, Azure Blob Storage or Azure Table Storage as a long term data persistence engine? The answer is probably no in real terms. Azure and the Microsoft stack also support using technologies that are not Microsoft centric. […]

Geolocation has become a part of the life of anyone using an electronic device today. Often times we are not even aware that it is being used. Smart Phones often have the ability to perform GPS capabilities. Some stored have found they can capture your GPS information from your Cell Phone and determine where you are shopping while in their […]

Today I had the opportunity to learn more about the database connection settings and how they impact query performance and behavior. When you connect to SQL Server there are a number of connection settings. A key setting for the performance of your application is Arithabort . Arithabort determines the behavior of SQL Server when it encounters different mathematical errors such […]

Some predict the internet is fragmenting. It was not designed with the level of security in mind that we have come to require. Moreover, governments and organizations have broken into data assets not intended for their purposes under many guises of legality. Irrespective of the legality, individuals are not willing for their personal information to be monitored. The fragmentation is […]

The decision to use a Delegate over inheritance is pretty straight forward in my simple understanding. Inheritance is best when you have a number of methods or properties that must follow a specific contract, ie. an interface. When all you want to do is to dynamically determine what method to call, which may have a different internal behavior, but share […]

Today I want to talk about a time when I had to optimize some dot net code. I started using Linq. But the code didn’t perform fast enough (probably because I was a novice at Linq). I needed the fastest performance when joining data from two collections? I’m not sure Linq is the fastest…but generally it is good enough. One […]

Here’s a quote from the Fellowship of the Rings; “Sometimes it’s the little things that change the world.” I have found that to be true when working with databases. There are a few things that can make all of the difference in performance and accuracy. Here are some examples: Use appropriate normalization for an application: Denormalize may be appropriate for […]