For today I just want to share a little personal experience. I’ve been writing in my editorials small segments of a presentation I made live, last night at the FoxPass users group in N/E Wisconsin. It’s a good thing too. I had the presentation completed with slides, database, demonstration queries and everything locked and loaded, ready to go. My cat […]

Do you want to speed up your table value functions? Sure you do. I suppose that was a silly question. Today I’m giving you a simple technique to help make them run faster. This isn’t new knowledge; but you may not have come across it yet. The simplest table value function can be the same thing as a view. It […]

A couple years ago I wrote about programming with Aspects. From a theoretical perspective, programming with aspects is like combining two different programs into a single program at compile time using coding conventions to link the two together. A common use of aspects is for tracing code execution or logging errors. For conventional error handling you would implement try/catch, and […]

Today I want to wrap up this series on time with a short review and some thoughts on the virtual nature of time.. Time based events may be a single event. That single event may be a durable event with continuing implications, such as a wedding date. You get married at one time’ but, you continue to be married until […]

Yesterday we considered two different kinds of time. A point in time is an event that occurs and is completed immediately. A time segment is an event that begins at a specific point in time, and ends at another, later point in time. The later point in time for a time segment may not have yet occurred. Time becomes more […]

In a database there are two basic forms of time. The first is a point in time. This can be defined according to the smallest level of granularity available in your database engine. Often the nearest second is acceptable. In SQL Server, the single type DATETIME will round to the nearest 3 milliseconds. Using DATE and TIME you can be […]

I’m preparing a presentation on Time for the Fox Valley Pass group next week. I thought it might be nice to provide a little preview on the topic. One of my favorite characteristics of time is that it never stands still. What you do tomorrow will be yesterday, two days from now. The point is that time is durable. In […]

HTML 5 defines many new features that may be enabled through HTTP. One of the coolest, although, less applicable, is Web Sockets. Web sockets allow a client and server to open and maintain communications over a negotiated pipeline. You use sockets all the time, maybe without even knowing. When you open up a connection to a database server, the implementation […]

A tweet from Scott Hanselman pointed me to a blog, and a series of tweets targeted on mean behavior to immature commitments of code to open source projects. A blog was posted regarding mean responses to newbie commit requests, where the person in charge would accuse the individual of doing a bad job, and wasting their time. I reminded that […]

Way to go Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2015 RTM is available this week. There are a lot of new things that should really increase productivity. That’s really the reason for using a powerful code development tool of this kind. While it has been possible to create your own extensions for Visual Studio for quite some time, this release has a […]