Today has been long. I’ve been trying to figure out why on earth my Remote Debugger wouldn’t run. I had the Remote Debugging Monitor set up correctly on both machines, but I kept getting an error message about DCOM: “Unable to start debugging on the web server. The Visual Studio Remote Debugger on the target […]

So I wrote my first Linq to Entity Framework query today. Took a little bit of research to really understand what was happening, but here goes my explanation: using (DataBase db = new DataBase()) // Relatively obvious… This sets up the data connection. { //var letters = db.Receipt_View; // A custom MSSQL View based on […]

So I decided today that I would knock out two birds with one stone: Get started using Test Driven Development so that I can learn how to use it in an upcoming project Start earning “street cred” by solving the Euler Project puzzles. I’ve been putting off TDD due to fear, consternation, and general trepidation […]

Yesterday was the April meeting for North Houston .Net User’s Group.Tony Champion introduced us to the benefits of developing Rich Internet Applications in Silverlight 3. While I haven’t done any SL3 applications in the past myself, his demos showed a remarkably robust data-driven form application that he wrote using Entity Framework and Silverlight, and it […]

Tonight is the April meeting for Alt.Net Houston.We will be meeting at Star City Pizza down on 59 and Shephard.Be there at 6PM!

Mohammed Azam, from High On Coding, recorded the following podcast during the Houston Alt.Net Open Spaces Conference, April 3-5. Podcast: Houston ALT.NET Open Spaces Why Blog and Open Source?

Software quality refers to a number of standards, from functionality (does it perform as expected) to performance (does it perform as QUICKLY as expected). When considering quality from the development perspective, the question “Does it work” is only the tip of the iceberg. For instance, in writing a base “Hello World” application, there are a […]

While using MS Expression Web, I received an error stating “This element is not allowed to be self closing in the current schema. Remove the closing slash.” I had never seen that error before, and went hunting for the root cause. Enter this nifty post that explains WHY self-closing elements could be bad:http://stackoverflow.com/questions/348736/xhtml-is-writing-self-closing-tags-for-elements-not-traditionally-empty-bad-pra/348818#348818

Interesting post from CodeThinked: Top Ten C# Keywords to avoid I will have to mull this one over. I suspect I use the “out” keyword more often than I ought to. I think I agree, however, with the multiple comments reminding the reader that these are keywords to “avoid”, not drop out of the language […]

Need to change all the table schemas at one time? In my case, the default schema in the early run through DB design was the username (i.e. username.tablename) Obviously, this has caused problems down the road. Here’s a fairly simple fix that will work in SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008:exec sp_MSforeachtable “ALTER SCHEMA […]