Ben Griswold on June 10th, 2008

I vividly recall creating my Windows Live account and wondering how many folks are able to guess the 8 character CAPTCHA on the first attempt. I swear the CAPTCHA presented to me looked like random scribbles in a box. I did take screen shots but they seemed to have disappeared just like my patience on [...]

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Ben Griswold on June 2nd, 2008

I very recently posted about using SubSonic to generate my DAL and SSMS Tool Pack to generate the complementing stored procedures.  In response to the post, Jon Galloway asked a great question in the comments: Thanks for the pointer to SSMS Tool Packs. It looks really interesting. One thing I’m having trouble picturing is the [...]

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Ben Griswold on May 24th, 2008

I woke up this morning (whew) wondering what percentage of the development community is privileged enough to deploy their own stuff.  I wonder because I think I’m out of touch in this area.  Over the past 6 or so years I’ve been handing off installation/deployment duties to other groups.  My development teams and I were [...]

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Ben Griswold on February 9th, 2008

Whenever I can get away with it, I include basic troubleshooting information in the footer of my web applications.  So it isn’t distracting (or blatantly exposed) to the standard user, the text is hidden.  In other words, I make the font color the same as the background color so the text is only visible when [...]

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Ben Griswold on February 5th, 2008

I sat through an absolutely fantastic presentation on query optimization a couple of weeks back.  The presenter did a fine job of covering many of the basics like SET NOCOUNT ON, minimize cursor use, avoid explicit or implicit functions in the WHERE clause and why not to use the sp_ prefix when naming custom stored [...]

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Ben Griswold on December 14th, 2006

My current project has me exercising a number of financial formulas on security and benchmark data. I have 2 – 3 sets of data which based on their type (benchmark or not) have varying calculations which set similar properties.  I won’t bore you with the details, but the calculations do require more than the four basic math operators.  In [...]

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Ben Griswold on November 19th, 2006

Not so long ago, one of our applications failed when we tried to handle the 32,768th user entry. Though the database was able to manage the request, the application held onto the row’s identity in an Int16 property.  The overwhelming response to the error was “That was really, really dumb.”  I tend to agree on a couple of [...]

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Ben Griswold on November 3rd, 2006

A couple of years back, I was tasked with compiling C# coding standards for our development department.  To be honest, I wasn’t all that excited about the assignment.  Previous attempts had been met with quite a bit of resistance and worthless debate and I wasn’t sure I really wanted to open that can of worms again.  After [...]

Continue reading about Coding Standards – The Devil Is In The Details