In the past I have written about the Fail Fast principle.  This is a principle I try to live my development life by.  I would rather explicitly check for possible failure points then have a runtime error crop up.  In the past when writing these failure check we have had to resort to a...

This post is another in the recent string of How-to's. But it is just so hard to resist. .Net 3.5 has so many cool features, it is just fun to explore them all. Ok, so here is the issue we are going to solve today. We have a list of entities and we need to sort them. In this post I will show you...

Today I was refactoring some sql procs along with the corresponding .net code that called the procs. My primary focus was to implement some new business rules (ways to get totals) in the proc.  In doing so, I completely re-wrote the proc.  In the end the return values (column names) were the...

So today I finally took the first test on the path to getting my MCTS Cert. This was the 70-536 test which is the first test in their new series for .net developers. Yea, I passed the first one, that SUCKED. I, along with the others on my team have been studying for this test for the past 2+ months....

Lately I have been playing around with Microsoft Expression Blend. Expression Blend is a product that allows for the creation of XAML based Windows client (not its only use, but what I am using it for). You can find more information about it here at its product page. I started using Expression Blend...

Over the years I have come to the conclusion when working with switch statements that switches on enum values, a DEFAULT block MUST be required. Not only should it be required, I think it should throw a developer exception. *** NOTE *** My stance on this is ONLY in scenarios where the switch statement...