Here is the situation. You are writing a program in Java. You need to access data in a Microsoft SQL Server via stored procedure and the data has an XML field. A what field? SQL Server 2005 introduces a new datatype for XML. It is essentially a blob field that you can perform XML operations …
In the original posting, Conditional Statements And Comparison Order, I brought up a coding style used by some software engineers that struck me as odd. The practice of placing a constant value first in a conditional comparison. For example: if(“Some String” == aVariable) { // Do some stuff } … Listing 1 I never liked …
I apologize ahead of time for this soap box, but I have just read the nth forum posting with a response like this. I have been a fairly flexible software engineer for the majority of my career and this means that I use many different programming languages. What language do you need? If I do …
I am working on some legacy code that is currently in VB.NET running on the .NET 1.1 Framework. I went to add a property to a class and received this error: Property without a ‘ReadOnly’ or ‘WriteOnly’ specifier must provide both a ‘Get’ and a ‘Set’. Seriously? So I have to tell you that it …
Alex Iskold over at AdaptiveBlue.com wrote a very good article for any startup companies wanting to get their feet wet in the software market. Very well written and user-friendly guide titled… well it’s the same as I titled this post. 🙂 Software Engineering Tips For Startups (the real article)
I am not a huge .NET fan, but I am mature enough to overcome my personal likes and dislikes in a professional setting and use whatever is needed. I recently ran into a situation programming in C# that I needed to create a method that took it’s parameters by reference. Why would you want to …
In object oriented programming there is the concept of classes and/or objects. These are nice encapsulated bits of code that allow one to store data and/or functionality. One of the ways to add data to an object is to give it some properties. The “right way” of doing this usually involves adding some private data …
iPhone SDK and Apple Finally Listening — Apple Computer’s Steve Jobs just announced that Apple would (finally!) provide an iPhone SDK to 3rd party developers in order to enable them to create native applications for the iPhone (and, incidentally, also for the iPod touch). While the actual SDK won’t ship until February 2008, this announcement …
Peer code review is happening behind the scenes at your competitor’s shop. Are they wasting their time or gaining a competitive advantage? What type of review actually works? 10 practical essays from industry experts giving specific techniques for effective peer code review: Cisco: The largest-ever case study of peer code review Modern experiments: results of …
One of the great things about WordPress plugin development is the abundance of open source content to learn from. Ever see a plugin in action and wonder, “how does that work?” or “How can I modify the WordPress XML-RPC system?” Well, all you have to do is download it and see! Most plugins are licensed …