In the spirit of doing a few things at the same time, Microsoft’s Parallel Computing Platform (PCP) team has unveiled ‘Microsoft Parallel Extensions’ for the .Net Framework 3.5. Here’s a link to the official Parallel Computing Team site. You may download a Community Technology Preview of the latest Parallel Extensions […]
Design Concepts and Code
54 posts
Well recently I tried to give a live example of a design pattern for optimistic concurrency. It’s been a while (more than 12 months) since I last demonstrated this in practice, so I’ve been a bit rusty. Some time ago, I was working on a project at Microsoft with a member […]
So there was a thread recently on the aus-dotnet mailing list which piqued my interest. Bill McCarthy wrote (and I agree) that as a general rule you ought to always call public properties when your calling code is external to the target class/code. As to calls or references made within […]
So we came across an old problem today which I couldn’t immediately remember the solution to. As a result, I figured I will blog about it. it’ll make it easier to come back across later when the same problem comes up again! The first time around, I managed to […]
I recently had an email chat with Dr Greg Low (Microsoft Regional Director & Readify) during the week about the best naming conventions (best practices) for SQL Server (especially in the post-hungarian notiation, SQL 2K5 schema days). In fact, this is a topic being discussed (again) on the SQL Downunder […]
Today.. Polite SQL Server manners.. 1. Use a consistent naming convention Pretty obvious rule, this one.. Best to try and stick to a common SQL syntax too… 2. Indexes: use them Why, oh why does it take so long to query 100,000 rows? 3. Keep the […]
As you may recall from part 1, this series of posts is about how to retrieve the target of a Windows shortcut (.lnk). Now, I left off part 1 in C++ land, as I’d compiled a Win32 Dynamic Link Library which called the Windows Shell in order to extract […]
It’s time for a more technical article. Recently I went on a trip overseas and while away I took a lot of photos. Being such a smart guy, I came up with what I thought was a smart way to pick out the best photos. I created subdirectories, and created shortcuts […]
Lets take time out to talk about the very tech/geeky topic of enums (enumerators). They can be fun, and also quite frustrating. Apologies in advance, I only do code samples in C# or C++. I might do Visual Basic examples, by request. Here are the Australian states listed […]