I just finished a 2 session bug hunt and I feel quite foolish. See if you can spot the bug. Algorithm The abstract operation IsWordChar takes an integer parameter e and performs the following: If e == –1 or e == InputLength, return false. Let c be the character Input[e]. If c is one of the sixty-three characters below, return true. _ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

This week brought one of the highest achievements in my career and community work. On June 23rd it was announced by Red Gate and SQL Server Central that I had made it into the finalists for the Exceptional DBA of the Year award. WOW! Every time I say it, I still get that feeling in my gut only certain things that you are truly emotional about can bring. June 23rd, 2010

So how exactly does your favorite compiler turn text into executable code? Lexical Analysis Syntactical Analysis Semantic Analysis In this post I want to go over the lexical analysis process. The process might seem a little daunting at first but with the right tools and a little patience you would be surprised with what you can accomplish. The only goal of the lexical analysis process is to take an input string and return a sequence of tokens that represent input string.

In continuing Chrissie’s recent example of helping to point out minor (yet critical) gotchas, I now present the guarantor of a few Null Reference exceptions, If() and IIf(). Both are designed as a way to provide VB.Net with an inline If, similar to the ternary operator found in C# and many other languages ?:. If() and IIF() have the same signature: If(,,) and IIF(,,) The critical difference between IIF (available from VS 2002 forward) and IF (available in VS 2005 forward) is that IIF is a function and evaluates all of its arguments prior to returning a value, while IF is an operator that executes like a short-circuiting conditional, only evaluating the true or false argument depending on the value of the conditional.

I still see too many people use And and Or when beginning with VB.Net. Since the introduction of VB.Net, way back in 2002, there have been AndAlso and OrElse. In most cases you should prefer them over And and Or. Now why would they have picked a less logical name for something you should actually use more? As always it is simple, backward comparability. And it goes back to the beginning of the B in VB.

Microsoft has made available for download the June 2010 Release of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit. The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2010 features and a variety of framework technologies including: C# 4 Visual Basic 10 F# Parallel Extensions Windows Communication Foundation

Welcome to the last day of Community Service week for SQL University. Before we get started, I’d like to say it has been nothing short of a pleasure writing the last two weeks for SQL University. All of the discussions and topics were a lot of fun to go over and I’m looking forward to hearing from everyone how they were able to use them. Don’t forget to pass SQL University and the community itself on to the person to your side that may not be aware of them.

I think this was the first time I ever used the Select extension method. And it gave me an unexpected result. First I created a Person Class. Public Class Person Private _name As String Public Sub New() _name = "person1" End Sub Public Sub New(ByVal Name As String) _name = Name End Sub Public Property Name() As String Get Return _name End Get Set(ByVal value As String) _name = value End Set End Property End Class And what I wanted was to get a count of all the persons whose name was Test1.

SQL University is one of the greatest concepts I’ve seen in the SQL Community. Thanks to Jorge Segarra (Blog | Twitter)for coming up with it and organizing it. Today we are going to talk about something dear and close to the concept of SQL University. Blogging! Blogs are an important part of the concept of SQL University. With them we can easily bring this wealth of knowledge in the course syllabus format with writers from the SQL Community in a vast geographical range and range of expertise.

In the previous article we covered the creation of a basic Domain Controller for our Virtual Lab. Using this basic domain controller and a basic SQL Server machine, we will look at the creation of a basic user account, creating a service account, and addition of a system to the domain. Technical Area: Accidental Systems Administrator Level of Difficulty: Additional Articles:Virtual Lab entry on the LTD Wiki This post picks up where the Virtual Lab: Creating a 2008 R2 Domain Controller post left off.