So, you're wired in. Code is darting from your synapses through the ends of your fingertips, sprawling gracefully onto the devenv-framed canvas. You know precisely how this little soft machine must do its dance, and the IntelliSense can barely keep up with the science dropping from behind your eyeballs. Hold on—those calls there should be a separate class altogether. Right-click. Add. New. Um. Seriously. What should you call it? Who Cares Naming is important. Naming is difficult. Naming is an under-taught and underrated developer skill. In fact, I'm going to go as far as to say that if ...

Wrappers.  Encapsulation.  Facades.  All three of these are interchangeable.  There are multiple occasions when these design patterns are required.  They usually are needed when a client wants something they saw elsewhere or they think of something that was not originally put into the software.  Once such occasion was when a client wanted a parameter in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to default to the end of the day if a time was not specified for a datetime parameter.  My first thought was to have the user bump the date out one day so ...

I am currently on a project that has a page with many HTML tables (don’t judge me :) ).  The users wanted the rows to have alternating colors for each row as so many sites do these days.  I was trying to think of the easiest way to do this, and since my jQuery is a little iffy (I have not used it much yet – again, don’t judge me :) ), I decided to see if I could whip something up relatively quickly.  My first attempt was the following: <script type="text/javascript">    $(document).ready(function...

That Does It. Today is the day. The day you finally throw down your hat and bid adieu to the angle-percents. The day you snatch hypertext from the jaws of awkwardly-indented awkwardness. Today you upgrade your ASP.NET MVC Views to Razor. The gorgeous, buttery syntactical goodness of Razor. The seamless weaving of server code and HTML in a next-to-godliness codebase you've always known was possible, but was just out of—um. Oh, right. Like you're not a psychopath for clean code. You, Sir! How About A Shave? Here's the thing. All that text editing? Thrilling, at first. You're removing surplus ...

Sliding Window… I like that name. It’s reminiscent of summer evenings, cracking the window next to my bed after a rain shower and inhaling the heady aromas of dirt, trees, and the general outdoors. It instills a sense of calm, of ease, and that all is well in the world. So, is it an appropriate name for a technique used to load data? Yea, I think so… The sliding window approach to loading data is a method where the primary goal is to minimize the impact on users or applications accessing that data from our target table or tables. Yes, ...

Stop me if you've heard this one. "Have you worked in <shiny> yet? It's completely amazeballs. In version <next>.1, it even lets you <shinier>!" "Man, I've really been meaning to, but <Initech> has me super super busy with <green-screen nightmare> work. Maybe if I get assigned to the <legendary unicorn> project next year." I don't know about you, but that exchange—which I've witnessed more than once—just makes my stomach sad. Life is too short to sit clutching the edge of your desk day in and day out, crossing your fingers that you will get put on a project that is ...

There are times, no matter how much optimization you do, that a query just takes a long time to run.  I had one such query in a recent project I was working on where we are using Entity Framework.  The issue I ran into was that the call to the Stored Procedure containing the query would continuously timeout.  I needed a solution and it took some time to find one, so I thought I would share to help alleviate someone else’s pain. My first thought was that the setting would be added to the connection string for the EF model.  ...

Scott Hanselman, one of my very favorite celebrity developers, recently drafted a list of interview questions that those among us bearing the title of Senior Software Engineer should really know the answers to. And though the last time anyone called me Senior anything was in my high school Spanish class, I dress for the job I want, and I fell upon the list con fiebre just to see where I stood. Indeed, even if you are of the lowest caste of code monkey peons, you should do the same. If you've had your nose under the hood of ...

This morning I was seriously ready to pick my laptop up and use it to punch a nice, laptop-size hole in the closest wall. I was trying to send an email this morning, and Outlook 2010 kept informing me that it could not do as I asked. Searching on the interwebs provided me with lots of articles, blog posts, and message board threads. People told tales of corrupt Exchange mailboxes, errors in local .pst and .ost files, and problems with Task List entries.  I tried several of their suggestions, including using scanpst.exe to check my local files. There were errors, ...

I recently needed to use the jQuery UI Autocomplete feature (http://jqueryui.com/demos/autocomplete/) for a textbox to allow the user to have auto-complete functionality. However, the source of my auto-complete data was not a local Array, but a WCF service. Hence, I set out on my quest to find a way to query (no pun intended) WCF with jQuery. In order to access WCF with jQuery, the WCF service and endpoint need to be set up correctly. This entails the following: Set the WCF Service Contract for ASP.NET Compatibility Mode: [ServiceContract()][AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode=AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] Set the ...