After over 6 months of silence, it is time again for another Stupid me™®©! For those unfamiliar with the concept: Every time I do something "stupid", which happens from time to time, I'll do a little blog post on what happened and how I solved it. The reason for this is twofold: I'll have a solution online I can consult if it happens again and other people can benefit from my mistakes as well.
This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.
Product Information Management (PIM) or Product Content Management (PCM) systems do exactly what they say: they manage the information about products. What do you mean with product information/content? Product information is literally all the information you can find about the products a company is producing/selling. Think of: Article number, product name, EAN number, description sizes and colours Detailed specifications Price information Images, video’s, URL’s Promo and marketing information Packaging information Datasheets, manuals Sale information Availability information Relations with other products … And multiply all the above with all the languages of all the countries a company is selling to.
When working with numbers with high precision be very carefull to not be caught by the default behavior of.Net. Let us take a simple case. Assert.AreEqual(0.100000000000001, 0.1000000000000010000000000001D)``` Nunit will say that the above test passes. While it is obvious to us that it shouldn’t. It is however less apparent when doing something like this. Assert.AreEqual(0.100000000000001, sut.DecimalProperty)``` This happens because the VB compiler wil try to find the best signature for the AreEqual method that fits the parameters that you are trying to give it.
Wix is lots of xml but for simple setup programs it isn’t all that bad. I guess it can become a maintenance problem for big projects but for small things it’s kind of easy to use, once you understand the madness and forget the bad documentation. So I like to keep some order in my installfolder (the one where your program is installed. I like to keep the helpfile(s) in their separate little folder.
Long time since I posted something on this blog but I hope to pick up the pace again. Only the subjects of the post will slightly change. Working for a large e-business integrator in Belgium can have some unexpected effects on your career. It all started almost a year ago with a simple sentence: “We want to extend our product portfolio with Product Information Management and we think you are the right person to help us with this.
It’s all about balance. While reading through many blogposts one might think that there is just one best practice that will solve all problems. I can tell you there isn’t. It’s all about balance and finding the right balance for you. One form of TDD or BDD might work for that little project you are doing and will fail miserably for that other project you are doing because the UI can just not be tested in an easy way.
If you find a need to install multiple version of SQL Server on a laptop of server, you are bound to run into a problem with the MMC snap for configuring the instances. One of the most common, the remote procedure call failed. This error is simply due to the lack of backward compatibility for 2008 SQL Server Configuration Manager. In this case, the set of events that were probably taken were
It’s almost time for the biggest SQL Server focused conference in the world – PASS Summit. I’ll be heading down to Charlotte, NC for a week of learning, teaching, running, and networking! There are two days of full-day preconference sessions on Monday, October 14 and Tuesday, October 15. Guess what? I’m presenting a precon! Tuesday, I’ll be teaming up with my coworkers Brent Ozar and Kendra Little to teach “Make SQL Server Apps Go Faster”.
It’s the second Tuesday of the month, and you know what time it is! That’s right, another installment of T-SQL Tuesday which is hosted this month by Rick Krueger (blog | twitter). The topic is about that one time we did a hack to get something sorted out, because of time pressure, budget, sheer laziness or whatever the reason was. My story is not about a hack in its purest definition, but it is about a nice alternative way to get something done more efficiently.
This week I’m starting a new series on “Real World Azure”. These are stories or issues I have run into while working with Azure in the “Real World”. Today we’re looking at a bug in the Azure API for Queue Services that appears to have been around for at least the last two versions of the storage API (prior to 2011-08-18, or SDK 1.7). Real World Azure There are a lot of great resources out there on Azure, from demos to webcasts to white papers filled with architectural diagrams.