February 13, 2010
Browsers
When Chrome was first launched by Google, and the media found out about it, they proposed that Google had Microsoft firmly in it’s sights and was potentially about to start a new browser war, i beg to differ in my opinion on this. Internet Explorer has one major advantage that no other browser has, and for the near future at least, will continue to have: locked in marketshare in enterprise and all new copies of Windows. Internet Explorer will never be crushed. No matter how crap Internet Explorer becomes, it has the (some may say unfair, but i believe that’s life) advantage of already being installed 90% of the time. So who should really be afraid of Chrome spreading its wings? Apple and Mozilla and if you still care: Opera.
January 30, 2010
Hidden features
There are quite a few built-in stored procedures in Microsoft's SQL Server that can help you troubleshoot database issues and make those long nights less painful. Knowing they exist can be a life saver, so lets take a look.
January 27, 2010
ASP.Net
Today i came across something that from my day-to-day coding i have noticed a lot of my fellow coders at work/play have let slide on their path to .Net Mecca – using the MailSettingsSectionGroup section of the web.config to specify both SMTP server host details as well as they other properties such as user/pass credentials in a central, single, easy to use manner. So I'll take this opportunity to make it as easy as possible for you to use.
January 13, 2010
Browsers
For those of you kiddies loving you Windows 7 goodness you may have discovered that from a web development point of view having an Internet Explorer 6 installation without much hassle is a pretty cool thing. Although the fact that you have to launch Windows Xp mode up and can’t use it as a “native” application by launching it from within Windows 7 is a bit of a let down. Let’s fix that :)
January 11, 2010
ASP.Net
Today i was reading a post by Rob Conery in which he discussed both his thoughts on developer productivity in relation to the creation of a new OS project (ASP MVP), and how he may have thought that in some instances hiding behind WebForms and not touching MVC was really just laziness or ignorance mistaken for productivity. Additionally i also read another post by Scott Bellware in which talks about a similar subject, in that developer productivity when viewed in isolation, is really a myth.
December 16, 2009
ASP.Net
Today i found myself wanting to quickly export a dataset to CSV and i didn’t want to bloat of a library that does more than i need. The following method is the result of this need/want.
November 29, 2009
MS SQL
It seems we live in an age where a lot of things are taken for granted on the web. Alternative spellings of things being offered to us when we search is a common example of this – simply look at Google and Bing’s “Did you mean X?” and you’ll know exactly what I'm talking about. At first though this can be seem quite daunting for the everyday web developer, but luckily Microsoft SQL server is here to save the day!
November 25, 2009
General banter
Today i was reading an article on the Sydney Morning Herald website by one of their travel bloggers. In it they asked the question “Have you noticed that backpackers tend to talk about the same things to world over?” and it got me thinking something that i used to think quite a bit: “Are most conversations that people have the same ones everyday?”. A lot of developers I've worked with definitely fit this statement.
November 17, 2009
MS SQL
Recently I was working on a project where I had to return a simple list of products, and if they had images associated with them, return information about only one along with the product. Times like these, a simple left join or inner join just doesn’t cut it if there are more than one image/record per product. When this happens there is almost always a simple solution, so let’s take a look.
November 10, 2009
C#
There are times when you want to read a text file that is in use – or as i have had many times, code you have recently execute hasn’t fully let go of the file when you go to read it – when you copy something to a directory and the AV scans it or any other times when you want a file’s contents but don't want to have to worry about locks.