(Brian Noyes) A good data access layer is critical for most business applications, whether that layer resides on a middle tier application server, a web server or on the client. Data access layers tend to involve a lot of error-prone, repetitive coding if you try to do it by hand. You can allevi

(Don Kiely) In the first two parts of this series, I explained why running as an admin on your local Windows workstation is a bad thing, giving malware nearly free rein over the machine, and why running with a least-privileged user account (LUA) is far safer. But as I explained in part 2, runnin

(Rick Strahl) If you run a Web shop that uses direct credit card processing and you want to integrate PayPal, you’ll find that using PayPal as a processing service is not as straightforward as using a payment gateway. In this article, I’ll describe how you can minimize the external PayPal intera

(Scott Swigart) In this two-part article series, you’ll see how you can easily add encryption and data compression (ZIP) capabilities to existing VB6 applications using the .NET Framework. While encryption and compression may not seem like related technologies, if you think about it, each one ta

(Justin Whitney) The Visual Studio 2005 Release Candidate is out, with final launch approaching fast. This is great news for everyone, with developers of all stripes getting the love with this release. And sometimes-overlooked Office developers are no exception. Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 (

(Waqar A. Cheema) With optimistic locking becoming the first choice when implementing web applications, handling concurrency violations is becoming more and more important. This is due to the fact the when we use optimistic locking we are not maintaining a lock on the record at the DB or application

(John Robbins) Those of you who have been reading this old Bugslayer column over the last nine years have branded into your frontal lobe a single word: ASSERT! Anytime you can have the code tell you about a problem instead of having to find it by slaving away with a debugger is a huge timesaver. As

(Alejandro Gervasio) Caching within the context of PHP application acceleration can be triggered based on three possible categories: time expiry, content change, and manually. This article covers an application that triggers the caching mechanism based on a content change condition.

(Warren Thornthwaite) Data mining has come into its own over the past decade, taking a central role in many businesses. We’re all the subject of data mining dozens of times a day—from the direct mail we receive to the fraud-detection algorithms that scrutinize our every credit card purchase.

(Scott Mitchell) In one of the consulting projects I’m working on a website that has user accounts (like most every non-trivial Web application). User accounts for this site can be created in one of two ways: by the user himself, in which case that user provides their email address and password; or