DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by AlexCuse

SQL Server Precision And Scale Problems

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:31:04 GMT

Many people are confused about SQL Server's precision and scale. This is unfortunate because choosing the correct values for precision and scale is critically important when you perform math operations using the decimal/numeric data type

SQL Find last week date range

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:31:04 GMT

The other day we needed to write a report on online sales for the last week. SQL doesn't offer developers many predefined functions to work with date ranges unlike the C# programming language. Here is a little example how to query SQL for some data between the dates for the last week.

Pair Programming - Marketing FAIL

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:01:05 GMT

When people talk about lack of adoption of "XP" (aka Extreme Programming) practices, one of the chief problems people have with it is the idea of "Pair Programming"

XNA Game Studio 3.0

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:01:20 GMT

The good folks who put together our gaming tools have released XNA Game Studio 3.0.

Suspicious DNK Accounts

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:31:29 GMT

Conclusion There is an incentive for publishers that use DNK to setup phony accounts that will help get stories from certain domains on the front page. So guess what happens ... it would appear that a certain number of people are doing this.

Grouping Controllers with ASP.NET MVC

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:01:02 GMT

question that often comes up is how do you group controllers when building a large application with ASP.NET MVC. Often, the question is phrased as whether or not ASP.NET MVC supports "Areas", a feature of Monorail. According to the Monorail documentation, MonoRail supports the concept of areas, which are logical groups of controllers. All controllers belong to an area. The default area is an empty (unnamed) one

Using Active Directory to authenticate users to your ASP.NET Web Site

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:16:02 GMT

ASP.NET membership provides the ability to authenticate users to your web application using forms based authentication against a database of users or directory services. This article explains the steps required to provide authentication against Active Directory, either for new sites with no authentication, or for existing sites using database authentication.

LINQ To SQL is Dead - Read Between the Lines

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 18:46:13 GMT

David Hayden with some great points on the Linq to SQL announcement and some ideas on how the project could be saved.

Caliburn Alpha for WPF and Silverlight is here!

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 02:58:54 GMT

Caliburn is a framework designed to aid in the development of WPF and Silverlight applications. It implements a variety of UI patterns that are geared towards solving problems encountered in real-world scenarios.

An interview with Roy Osherove author of "The Art of Unit Testing"

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:46:02 GMT

A short interview with Roy Osherove, author of a new book "The Art of Unit Testing" and known blogger, who works on Typemock Isolator.

Blisteringly fast Integration Tests with NHibernate and SQLite

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:46:02 GMT

Intergration tests can be slow and can be painful to run often. In this post I cover using SQLite with NHibernate, and automatically switching between SQLite and SQL Server

Google Chrome, The New Kid On The Block

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:04:32 GMT

So when Google announced they had a new browser that was going to break down all the barriers of the internet and the desktop I got excited at the prospects of what they were going to do and what this new user interaction would be. Well today they finally announced the release of the browser and made it public at: http://www.google.com/chrome

Creating a Content Management System for your ASP.NET Web Site

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 08:01:03 GMT

This article will show you how to integrate the popular FCKeditor HTML Text editor into an ASP.NET site to provide your users with the ability to edit their web site without them having to access the underlying HTML or source files.

Dear Alt.Net Developers: Stop blaming Microsoft and WebForms for crea

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:46:02 GMT

I am responsible for every website I create. If I create a site or application that is unmaintainable or that has poorly formed HTML or doesn't render well in all browsers, that is my fault. I chose my development tools/framework, or my employer, who I choose to work for, chose the development tools/framework. Either way, it is my responsibility, as a professional, to do my utmost to create the best possible application that is within my capability to create.

Why I Am No Longer Supporting IE6

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:46:03 GMT

In the recent relaunch of this site, I created a new custom skin for Subtext. Since this is just a personal site, I threw things together fairly quickly, testing along the way with Firefox3 and IE7. Once I was getting closer to complete, I took a look at my new site in all the usual browsers, including IE6. Ugh, it looked terrible. I gave it some thought and made some decisions about supporting IE6. I'm not going to support it. Not on this site and not on others that I have a say in. I'm not talking about leaving my site unusable for IE6 users - they just won't get as good of an experience. I'm not alone with this decision. Read on to see why I am no longer supporting IE6.

Convenience Kills, or the Case Against RAD Tools

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:31:09 GMT

A rather heated discussion erupted last week on Twitter and IRC concerning so-called "drag-and-drop demos" - point-and-click demonstrations of "software development" that just involve dragging controls around on a graphical designer without a lot of actual coding involved. Being entirely unable to resist joining in on debates, I had to chime in and give my two cents.

Organize Usings Across Your Entire Solution

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:01:06 GMT

One of the features I worked on for the Visual Studio 2008 release was the new "Organize Usings" feature. This feature allows you to: Remove Unused Usings - Determines which using directives are not used in the current file and deletes them. Sort Usings - Sorts the using directives in a file.

LTD Puzzle VIII - Converting between Roman and Arabic Numerals

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:46:09 GMT

The puzzle this week is simple. Write a program to convert to (and from) roman numerals. So your program should be able to take the input of 27 and return XXVII, and take MCMLXXXI and return 1981. And of course any other values....

I hate Vista. I'm moving to Windows Mojave.

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:31:03 GMT

So I've heard the bad press. I've seen the pc vs. mac ads. I've heard my friends' complaints about crashing, security, and speed. That's why I'm moving to Windows Mojave. It seems Microsoft finally got an OS right.

The Onion Architecture

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:16:08 GMT

The fundamental rule is that all code can depend on layers more central, but code cannot depend on layers further out from the core. This architecture is unashamedly biased toward object-oriented programming, and it puts objects before all others.

Skip lists are fascinating!

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:16:03 GMT

Skip lists are a fascinating data structure: very simple, and yet have the same asymptotic efficiency as much more complicated AVL trees and red-black trees. In this article, I discuss the asymptotic efficiency of operations on skip lists, the ideas that make them work, and their interesting use cases. And, of course, I give you the source code for a skip list in C#.

Foundations of Programming - Learning Application

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:46:10 GMT

If you're anything like me, you probably learn a lot better by going through code rather than reading books. I'm happy to release the Foundations of Programming Learning Application - it's a complete solution meant to show what was covered in the Foundations series.

.Net Extension Method Library

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:01:13 GMT

Lots of good extension methods here for C#

Extending the System.Drawing.Image clas to make a thumbnail

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:46:04 GMT

Extending the System.Drawing.Image clas to make a thumbnail easy way. Instead of using getThumbnail you just use Tothumbnail and a maximumsize, optional parameter is if you want to keep the aspect ratio.

IE on Acid

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 05:46:02 GMT

Cool wallpaper for those who like IE. more..