While reviewing some of the enhancements made in the Dot Net Framework 4.6.1, the most recent released version of the framework, I observed 2 additions to the ADO.Net classes. They have added native storage of external Hardware Generated Encryption keys. They have also improved the performance for establishing and maintaining connections to SQL Servers utilizing always on failover implementations. https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ms171868(v=vs.120).aspx#ADO.NET461 […]

What happens to all the other stuff? This is a common question that was recently brought up in response to my editorial on a Retrospective technique. In my editorial I reviewed a method where we identified a number of things we didn’t like and things we did like. Then, as a team, we prioritized the list into a top three […]

I’d like to share a personal experience of one of the most effective ways I have experienced a when taking a retrospective look at a body of work. That body may be for any period. It just needs to have a specific start, finish and intended goals. I was simply a participant, and don’t know if this isn’t already covered […]

When working with WCF web services you have a few options for transporting data to the client. Each method has its own benefits, and complications. Four mainstream techniques I am aware of are: Pass data as XML documents Pass data as JSON objects Pass data as POCO objects through shared library definition Pass data as Server side POCO objects. The […]

In today’s world it is more likely than not that you will be working with someone in a remote location. They may not be a great distance, maybe in the same building. Regardless of distance, there are some skills you need to develop for interacting efficiently with remote individuals. Some of the behaviors are not intuitive, and can really make […]

Are you taking advantage of the Model Database installed with every instance of SQL Server? As you may know, when you create a new database on an instance of SQL Server, it first makes a copy of the model database schema and data. This means your new database will clone any of the following: User Tables User Views Stored Procedures […]

TSQL User Defined Types have been with me since I started writing code in SQL Server in the early 1990s. Even still, I have not used them very often, even though they can provide a lot of standardization around your data. For those of you who haven’t used TSQL types, they work like this. You create your own type, based […]

Today I’m going to wax a little bit philosophical regarding the philosophy of object oriented programming. For those of us who work in more than just SQL, most of the languages popular today conform to some form of object oriented capabilities. Object oriented syntax has been designed to allow change to occur to programs over time, which most valuable software […]

One of my favorite features of some object oriented languages is the ability to write methods extending the capabilities of an existing class, while not modifying the original code in any fashion. Java, C#, F# and JavaScript are well known for this capability. In C#, it works by creating a method where the input has a single parameter of the […]

Another enhancement added to SQL Server 2016 is the Query Store. As I was reading about this feature I thought, “how really cool this is.” One of the SQL tricks I have used in the past is to maintain my own tables, either in tempdb, or elsewhere, with a history of query performance statistics. This allows me to track how […]