If you’re here for my opinion on the choice between universal healthcare and freedom, then you can navigate away. I’m here to showcase a poorly designed form:
11
Aug 09
Aug 09
When using a chart control to plot data from a stored procedure (or any query for that matter), the stored procedure needs to return series’ in columns. Data to be plotted has to be in numeric form. How, then, can we label the series? Perhaps one would think to add a row at the top of the result set to contain the labels. But that won’t work because the column data types are numeric and the labels are most likely strings.
11
Aug 09
Aug 09
If you’re having trouble plotting series of data using the Chart Control, make sure that the data coming in is plottable.
That means using a numerical data type. Duh!
11
Aug 09
Aug 09
While trying to work through an SVN problem:
“You can’t commit?
That’s fine I’ll commit for you.”
[ a few seconds later ]
“Ah, come over here man, there are conflicts we need to resolve”
11
Aug 09
Aug 09
(1:19:59 PM) Antonio: quick q… do you know which table the “Third Party Name” field might reside in?
(1:20:26 PM) Tim: thirdpartyeyewitnesses
(1:20:36 PM) Antonio: true that. thanks
(1:20:46 PM) Tim: yoip
(1:21:03 PM) Tim: ywoip
(1:21:06 PM) Tim: your welcome over ip
10
Aug 09
Aug 09
(12:13:08 PM) Tim: i want to get these all into trac
(12:13:12 PM) Tim: but redstagesvn [server] is down
(12:13:18 PM) Antonio: i couldnt get to trac this morning
(12:13:20 PM) Antonio: ah. yea
(12:13:21 PM) Tim: and i dont want to go fiddlin’ round in there until alex is in
(12:13:27 PM) Antonio: true
(12:13:35 PM) Tim: maybe i should violin around in there instead
9
Aug 09
Aug 09
At some point in our programming careers, we’ve had to reorder server-side (probably database driven) lists. For example, allowing users to set the specific sequence that image thumbnails are displayed on the front-end of a photo album.
For “move-item-forwards” functionality, the logic may look like:
move_item_up( index ){ Store the element at index 3 to a temporary variable. Set the value of index 3 to the value of index 4. Set the value of index 4 to the temporary variable's value. }
The “technique” comes into play now, when you have to do the “move-item-backwards” functionality.
Instead of:
move_item_back( 4 );
Simply use:
move_item_up( 3 );
Moving an item backwards in a list is the same as moving the previous item forwards. This technique is rather simple and perhaps painfully obvious to some, though it may be useful to others.
15
Jun 09
Jun 09
I was not much of a coffee drinker before college. In senior year, after only having coffee when I needed to be up late studying, I purchased this coffee maker for my room. Well, it was actually a Christmas present for my parents, but as it turns out, neither of them are regular drinkers.
One of the features I like is its ability to brew at a preset time. For example, during the week, I wake up to the smell of coffee, brewed automatically at 8:00am. Read more »
14
Jun 09
Jun 09
Many of Microsoft’s development products, when given an SQL query, will try to perform all sorts of analysis and breakdowns on the query — usually in an attempt to visualize what’s going on. When the queries become too complex (as the tend to be), they just can’t be parsed and visualized. Furthermore, when the successful parsing of a query is critical to one of their “wizards”, your report creation process can be brought to a standstill.
Queries that have a few levels of subquery nesting, or that have UNIONs, for example, will sometimes break parsing.
So, if you don’t want your development tools (such as Visual Studio) to get in the way of completing a report wizard, put your SQL query in a stored procedure. This way, your tools won’t be concerned with the nitty gritty details of your query. You can still pass @variables to the query, and you can make changes to the query without stepping into your designer’s .rdlc files.
