Last night I was at a BCS Young Professionals Group meeting at the BCS offices in Southampton Street, London. The meeting was part of a 'SkillCentre' series being run with the help of a consultant called Anthony Rees facilitating, and the subject last night was 'Negotiation Skills'. The session itself was excellent, culminating in groups coming up with a simple mnemonic to remember some basic concepts for negotiating. The group I was in came up with the mnemonic 'winwin': What do you want Investigate feasibility Note it down Walk in their shoes Identify tactics Negotiate! Another group... [More]

After various conversations on both internal and external projects, I’ve noticed that some of our web projects were being developed using a Session state called InProc. InProc means In-Process, so IIS is hosting all of the Session[“Dom”] = “Idiot!”; variables. Now, if the web application eats up too much memory, IIS 6 and above can be configured to recycle the Application pool – a contained unit of web sites, in order to free up memory. This is good for IIS but baaaad news for your website, as everything in the Session is lost – that could be shopping basket, current order status, use... [More]

When working on a project recently, the data saved back to the database was huge. We are talking well over 100 properties. After talking to my Java buddy, he said that one way is to create an IsDirty method that returns if the object has changed state. The IsDirty() method is used to query the state of an object - if it has been modified or not. The implementation is up to the developer, but ultimately it's use can save you a trip to the data source. I have split this example into 3 stages: First attempt Refactored Event Handled N.B. This article helps someone in (archaic) .NE... [More]

When writing stored procedures or views, I always create them in Visual Studio (2005/2008) and then run them on a specified database. When using "SELECT *", it is compact, but obviously does not help you find the columns of the table or view. When using the IDE, I added a new SQL Script for Stored Procedures, and then I typed: SELECT *FROM Customers and a blue box surrounded the statement. I right-clicked -> Design SQL Block. The designer then listed all of the column names for me, and when clicking OK, instantly put them back into the SQL script I was creating! SELECT CustomerI... [More]

Just a little note here that we noticed testing something (how it had not occurred before, I do not know).  We have a function that we were referencing from a referenced assembly that would format values to the slightly odd format being used by the ERP that we were talking too.  In  most cases it seamed to work OK, but for smaller values it didn't quite product the result we expected. It turns out that the result of the Division functiod in BizTalk Server 2006 is a double.  The mapper being the way it is converts this to a string (assumably using .ToString()).  At least this is how it looks w... [More]

My XP laptop had ground to a halt - 6 months without a rebuild and it had got so clogged that it literally took 5 minutes just to boot. I needed to wipe it and start again but the head of our technical team offered me a fresh laptop with a clean Vista Business build. Deciding that being a guinea pig was a nice idea, I accepted it. The 4 gig of ram (up from 2 gig) was the sweetener that made up my mind for sure :) As I was setting it up just how I wanted it, one of the things I needed to do was sync my two mobile phones with it. I have both an HTC 4350 (Herald) from work and my own personal HT... [More]