A good friend of mine is a REALLY good COBOL programmer. I didn’t say was. I said is. And he makes really good money programming in COBOL wellbecause there isn’t a lot of competition. His company has a huge investment in systems written in COBOL. So, they keep rolling along because it gets the job done, and it doesn’t make […]

Here’s an old topic with a new twist. Back in the old days we used to worry about using Engine Specific sql code on order to be able to port an application to another database engine than the one on which it was developed. The way you did this was to use (as much as possible) only ANSI syntax in […]

With HTML5 we are experiencing many of the same issues we had when Java was young. The problem is not with the Java specification, or in this case the HTML5 specification. The problem is with the implementation. Not all features are implemented. Not all specifications are complete, so browsers have their own implementation of the rough draft. The result is […]

The advances of browsers as they continue to implement HTML5 features have begun to redefine how we write code and where it is placed. With the expansion of RESTful services and the power of new JavaScript based libraries we are seeing more code executed in the browser than ever before. Browser code has become more testable and better organized. Code […]

Utilizing sharded data can be a complicated process. By now you probably know that sharded data is the distribution of data into multiple tables or even multiple databases. The problem then becomes how to retrieve that data from the distributed shards if you don’t have an already built in method such as partitioned tables in SQL Server? MySql has a […]

The last couple of editorials I have been considering the topics of Technical Debt and Code Smells. Two brave people have contributed their thoughts on these practices. Dilip writes: This Topic is of prime importance not just because of the situations mentioned by you such as : Fixing errors, Readability, trying to follow standards etc. but also because Every technology […]

Code Smells is a term I picked up from the Agile Community. The term applies to any custom software system regardless of SDLC. I have heard it described as code that can be improved. Reasons I have seen for code improvement may be: Readability Maintainability Streamlining Optimizing Applying a Pattern Simplifying Applying Development Standards Fixing Errors The primary reason it […]

It’s pretty hard to run a business without accruing some form of technical debt. Technical debt is easily described as that shortcut you took to solve some software problem with the thought that you’d come back and fix it sometime in the future. This is a very common, and in my opinion, a very appropriate action. It is like paying […]

Recently I have been looking at certifications again. The last certification I had was for a Microsoft Certified Software Developer back in the early 2000s using SQL Server 2000 as a base. I haven’t needed a certification to land work; nobody has asked or cared. Moreover, some of the certifications back then were simply a measurement of how good your […]

If you were restricted to only the Microsoft enabled software where would you be? Would you be restricted to SQL Server, Azure SQL Server, Azure Blob Storage or Azure Table Storage as a long term data persistence engine? The answer is probably no in real terms. Azure and the Microsoft stack also support using technologies that are not Microsoft centric. […]