Development
Thursday, June 21st, 2007
I upgraded from NUnit 2.2.9 to NUnit 2.4.1 and while there is all sorts of new goodness added (much of which I don’t yet use) I am quite disappointed in performance. The actual speed of each test hasn’t changed, but it takes longer than before to start running the tests and, more annoyingly, it takes ...
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Wednesday, February 21st, 2007
As a photography enthusiast (albeit a shamefully inactive one) I am incensed by the notion of restricting photography in public places. According to Simon Taylor, there are moves afoot in the UK to do just this and so he has started a petition against it.
As it turns out, there is no actual Bill being put ...
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Tuesday, February 13th, 2007
I was writing some ASP.NET authentication code last night and was trying to encrypt an authentication ticket using FormsAuthentication.Encrypt(). However, it kept returning null. I banged my head against the wall for about an hour and then went home. As so often happens, I came in in the morning and spotted the problem immediately: the ...
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Monday, February 5th, 2007
I went to WebDD on Saturday. It was quite an interesting event, indeed.
I attended several interesting sessions; from HTML microformats, to Ruby on Rails, to WPF and Microsoft Expression Blend.
Scott Guthrie was the man of the day: large throngs of developers vied for seats in his sessions. His talk on WPF/E was extremely interesting. ...
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Friday, October 6th, 2006
I always forget the binding flags needed to reflect over properties in .NET. So this is mainly an aide-mémoire for myself.
PLAIN TEXT
C#:
PropertyInfo[] props = typeof(MyType).GetProperties(BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic);
I ALWAYS forget that you need to include the BindingFlags.NonPublic flag!
Posted in C#, Development | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006
I read an interesting article today about Java EE dying in an SOA world. I know a lot of people complain about its complexity but I was surprised to read the claim from a senior analyst with the Burton Group that
In five years, Java EE will be the CORBA of the 21st Century.
In my opinion, ...
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Thursday, August 31st, 2006
I tried to uninstall SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition today and was mortified when, halfway through the uninstallation (is that a word?), "SQL Server setup encountered an error and needs to close"! I got a sickly, sinking feeling in my stomach - my immediate future was devoid of fun. After all, I needed to re-install ...
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Tuesday, August 29th, 2006
I was really confused this morning. I was executing a stored proc that returned a single row of data, and a return value. However, the return value was always null - even though the stored proc ALWAYS returned a return value. The code was domething like this:
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C#:
SqlParameter retval = new SqlParameter("@RETURN_VALUE", SqlDbType.Int);
retval.Direction = ParameterDirection.ReturnValue;
command1.Parameters.Add(retval);
using ...
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Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006
The Enterprise Library Data Access application block offers some time-saving routines for calling stored procedures. However, they don't all work when the stored procedure is a synonym.
For example, once I have a Database object, I can get a DataReader from a stored proc called GetUser by simply calling:
PLAIN TEXT
C#:
Database db = DatabaseFactory.CreateDatabase();
IDataReader reader = db.ExecuteReader("GetUser", ...
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Sunday, August 13th, 2006
The project I am working on required sorting, filtering and paging of large data sets. This isn't an uncommon requirement; yet the solutions are often either fiddly or not very performant. But fortunately, using SQL Server 2005's common table expressions and the new ROW_NUMBER() function, I managed to create a stored procedure that provides sorting, ...
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