I’ve been working with Microsoft SQL Server Common Table Expressions (CTE) lately and am totally impressed every time. My most recent experience was needing a temporary table with the fixed number of rows into which I would load some data based on the row number (basically). There are several ways to accomplish this with T-SQL. … [Read More]
What is SQL?
There are probably a hundred valid answers to this question. Nonetheless; I run into the question fairly regularly and also see some rather inaccurate beliefs about it. Let’s define some terms, I’ve attempted to order them in an order that helps with understanding. “RDBMS” is an acronym for Relational Database Management System. “SQL Server” is… [Read More]
IF or IIF
The IIF function in Microsoft VB is a statement that allows you to evaluate an expression and return one of two objects depending on the result of the evaluation. Neat. The problem that I had with IIF is that it always evaluates the true and false parts of the statement no matter the result of… [Read More]
MSMQ – Receive Remote Message
This is a continuation of how to utilize Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) in your application. The previous post on the subject is here. In most cases; the application, service, or web site that reads from an MSMQ will be local to that queue (on the same Windows computer or virtual machine). However; there are exceptions. … [Read More]
MSMQ – Receive Message
The introduction to this serious of Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) posts is here. This time around, I’d like to show you how to read (or receive, dequeue, or pick) a message from a local queue. By default, the first message read from the queue is the message with the highest priority followed by the time received… [Read More]
Message Queuing
Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) has been around a long time and, from my experience, is very stable. I have used the independent client approach with private queues in a variety of systems with excellent results. It is available in all versions of Windows Server and Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 (at… [Read More]
Buffer Size
Buffer Size?? Really?? I have spent a large portion of the last three weeks attempting to resolve a slow TCP Socket communication slowness problem. This particular problem was between a Windows Service and multiple Windows Forms Applications. Lots of network troubleshooting revealed nothing – neither did code reviews, gobs of debug, multi-threading research, and so… [Read More]
Isolated Storage
Isolated Storage is a slick little feature available to Microsoft .Net Windows applications and services. It allows a VB.Net or C#.Net assembly to persist some piece of information to a protected location on disk. This information can be a serialized object, a string, a date, or whatever. I use Isolated Storage fairly regularly in Services to… [Read More]
So you want to be a Developer?
I have been a software developer for over twenty years. This industry has been very good to me and I am thankful. I suppose it is not unlike any other industry – there have been lean years and years of plenty. However; like it or not, computers are here to stay and nearly everything is… [Read More]
XML Serialization
This is a continuation of this post regarding binary serialization. This time around, we are focused on XML Serialization, that is serializing an object to an XML document. That is, taking an in-memory instance of a class and “formatting” it as XML. Why would we do this? Simply to store the object somewhere (file, column in… [Read More]