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 […]

My favorite Open Source tools for Dot Net are NHibernate, NUnit and Log4Net. There are others I use. But these three seem to always be in nearly every application I write. What’s funny is that there are a lot of tools similar to these three. In fact, Microsoft has copied all three of them in one fashion or another. Entity […]

The USA has a reality game show called Survivor that has been going on for a few years. The point of the game is to take a number of people from different walks of life, strand them in an isolated location with nothing but themselves to provide food and shelter. Frequently they players had to vote someone to send out […]

From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coopetition Coopetition occurs when companies interact with partial congruence of interests. They cooperate with each other to reach a higher value creation if compared to the value created without interaction, and struggle to achieve competitive advantage. Often coopetition takes place when companies that are in the same market work together in the exploration of knowledge and research of […]