I have been thinking recently about the requirements of a good developer. But, I think I must first clarify what I mean when I use the term “developer”. My experience as a developer has, I feel, been different from a good number of others. For me, development meant much more than just being a simple code-monkey. Development meant shepherding a new application from its infancy as an idea in the minds of the users and/or management to a fully functional application deployed to a working environment.

As database professionals, our intent is to be as proactive as possible when it comes to delivering data with security, stability and speed in mind. Being proactive means active monitoring, reporting performance variations and most important, baseline capture. Adding to these three objectives, we can add Performance Notes to also provide key points of long term and short term performance problems. Let’s take a minute to discuss the three key points (Baselines, Active Monitoring and Reporting Performance)

Introduction You might have noticed that I am switching to WPF from winforms. I’m doing this gradually, but DI/IoC is making this very painless. For the moment I have both in the same app. I have not seen any problems yet. One of the advantages of WPF is that you can do theming, this lets you can change the look of your application in a single line of code. I guess you can do something similar in winforms but it needs a lot more work.

Lately we’ve been playing around with RIA services for Silverlight. Using them we lose the use of our stack, but the speed of development with them is quite impressive. Watch and Learn If you are unfamiliar with RIA in Silverlight, I would recommend this video: http://www.silverlight.net/learn/videos/all/net-ria-services-intro/. It is a complete walk through of creating a demo from the ‘Business Application’ template in Visual Studio for SL 3. If you are working in SL4, be sure to check the comments in the video for the breaking changes.

Introduction In VB9 we already had some anonymous delegate support but only with Functions. In other words your method needed to return a value for this to work. In VB10 we also have anonymous delegate support for methods that don’t return anything (void). This comes in very handy when you have to test some events and their return value. Prerequisites This is the class we are going to test.

I was looking at the stack they used for the new channel9 website. MVC 2.0, Unity (from P&P), NHibernate, Fluent NHibernate, Memcached, Enyim Managed Memcached driver, Azure – Fabric, Storage, Diagnostics, SQL Azure, xUnit (testing only), Live ID, Spark View Engine, Akismet (spam filtering service), AntiXSS, Tinymce, jQuery, and Silverlight. You can watch the video by Mike Sampson on how they built the new site if you want to know more.

Do you need an SSRS 2005 report that displays totals for the previous 3 months going horizontally across ? Well, I did, and my first approach involved using derived tables, each with a separate date range, to get each month’s total to appear in its own column. While I achieved my goal, performance was lousy because the query needed to execute 3 times (once for each date range). I shaved 2 minutes off the query execution time with a second approach.

Introduction A few days ago I made a post on how to make a factory with T4 templates. That version only made one factory for one namespace. So it was pretty limiting. But as you could see, in that example, we had 2 namespaces, namely Test and Test2. We need a factory for both those namespaces. We can either copy/paste or change our template to produce more files. After all, these files are nearly the same.

I wrote a blog post 437 days ago asking you the reader if you would be interested in a FxCop tool for SQL Server. That post can be found here: SQLCop, FxCop For SQL Server, Would You Be Interested in This?. Today I am pleased to announce that the first version of this tool is available. The tool is free and will remain free, we will never charge for it.

The recent thread in ASP.NET forums is the primary reason for this blog post. I want to show how error messages from the SQL Server were handled in our web pages. The site I was working on had most of the functionality developed by the previous developer. Unfortunately, most pages didn’t use a separation of layers and used SQLDataSource for data manipulations. The sample I want to show was called from InsertPerson.