As a software engineer, project proposals are available in spades. Learning how to evaluate business needs and technical needs is a basic job prerequisite (Parkinson, 2000). Parkinson explains that there is a significant difference between a technical requirement and a business requirement. An example of a technical requirement would be needing a new printer. A […]

Software Quality Software Quality is a concept has been discussed and defined in a number of excellent books and articles. Granular-Level specific characteristics are numerous, and the weight placed on one aspect may differ from company to company, or even from project to project. However, with the assistance of the Pfleeger and Atlee text (2006) […]

So I REALLY hate the way that Entity Framework does the Eager Loading system. One of the biggest things gained from EF over legacy ADO was the fact that queries have compile-time checking. With the .Include(string s) method, we end up back in the same place we started. I’m hoping things are fixed when .Net […]

I received the following error while trying to use Entity Framework to update an object. The property ‘AccessLevelID’ is part of the object’s key information and cannot be modified. The object is a User, who has an AccessLevel foreign key. The problem was in my code, which looked like this: user.FullName = FullName;user.LoginName = LoginName;user.Password […]

At some point during your SQL Server development time, you will eventually create a database while logged in to the server with a login other than SA. If this happens, your dbo user account will be mapped to the account which created the database (call it sa2 for now). A year later, when the db […]

If you’re using Windows Vista, the location of Visual Web Developer’s cache will be different from what I posted earlier. The new location is at C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Temp\VWDWebCache

Working with DLLs and C# plugins can be an interesting problem. In our particular case, I needed to be able to drop in a dll (not known at compile time) based on a known interface, and have it discovered an run during runtime. I found the following video that made everything crystal clear:http://www.johnkoerner.com/index.php?/archives/43-Creating-a-Plugin-Architecture-in-C.html Other interesting […]

An update to MS Office caused the following message box to appear continually:MESSAGE TEXT [Title] Office Live Workspace [Body]Get Started With Office Live Thanks for installing Office live add-in via Microsoft Update. You can now get started using Office Live Workspace. This Office Live Workspace lets you: -Access and view documents from almost any computer […]

So I was thinking about the situation of one of the websites I work with. The website is on a separate server from the SMTP server, so requests for information, purchases, etc. risk getting dead air. I chose to solve this problem by setting up a fairly simple queue on the web server. Essentially, any […]

JP Hamilton will soon be teaching a Code Dojo at the Houston Microsoft office. All of the information is on the Houston Alt.Net Wiki, so come over and check it out! If you’re ready to register, head over to the Registration Page. WHEN: May 7th at 6 PMWHERE: Microsoft Office in HoutonWHAT: Totally awesome TDD […]