= Yesterday I read the first chapter of the book titled “Cracking the Coding Interview” by Gayle Laakmann McDowell who founded the website www.careercup.com. I found the introduction to be extremely valuable because I was able to relate to it from an Interviewer’s perspective. Very smart people often don’t get job offers, and they don’t know why. I love to […]

What is a reasonable expectation when using software for which you have paid nothing? Do you have a right to any expectation? I believe the answer is yes; to the degree that they have made promises as to the features and capabilities of that software. For example, software that comes downloaded with other software which is installed on your system […]

A synonym is a very useful tool SQL Server tool for granting access to an object in an indirect fashion. You haven’t used Sysnonyms before? How do they work? What do they do? A synonym is an object you define in an SQL Database that acts as a replacement to other database objects in the same database, or another SQL […]

A few months ago I presented the concept of Aspect programming. Aspect programming is a technique of applying a common functionality across all aspects of your application without directly writing the code to make it happen. Instead, you link your aspects to your code with a language that looks for patterns in your code, and assigns the activity to some […]

In C# you have a number of options available when you need to return more than one value from a method call. Return a complex object containing multiple properties such as a Class or a Struct Return OUT parameters Return Ref parameters Return a tuple If you already have a Class or Struct defined in your business objects this is […]

2013 is winding down to a close. This last year has been a great opportunity for me to interact with you regarding software tools, packages, practices, and techniques. My goal in this column is to get you to dig deeper, perfecting the craft you have chosen when working with computer systems. Sometimes I like to provide tips. Sometimes I like […]

Coming up on the end of the year I thought it would be a good time to re-visit the question, “What does it mean to be complete?” It doesn’t matter what task you are performing, there are real benefits from having a clear understand of the expectations of all parties regarding the definition of “Complete”. I think when it comes […]

Today I thought I would share a little bit about the difficult XPath trail I had to go down to be able to parse data in an SQL Table. I simply wanted to extract the value of an attribute in the root node of the source XML. I found many examples online, but all simply returned null. Here is an […]

How are your XPath skills? I have been finding a need to learn XPath lately for mining xml data in a database, and for optimizing the App.Config for my Dot Net applications using Slow Cheetah (see previous editorial on Slow Cheetah). I have to say that the documentation on a lot of XPath I have found on the internet has […]

One tool I have always wanted to find was an inexpensive, or better yet open systems tool for monitoring Windows servers; specifically SQL Servers. Monitoring your server is a great resource when your performance starts to drag. Having a history of your server and database performance can help you determine if you have simply exceeded a threshold, deployed some poorly […]