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Entries Tagged as 'Software Development'

A simple Perforce backup script for the home

July 7th, 2007 · No Comments · Perforce

I use the free license of Perforce on my home network just to ensure version control and management of home coding projects, university thesis stuff, and general files that I just want to ensure I have previous versions of. It’s a really nice part of the Perforce licensing model that I can get two users [...]

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Thoughts on a ‘Powerful’ API

April 18th, 2007 · No Comments · Software Development

One of the words that keeps coming up when I have conversations about new products is that the API must be “powerful”. While intuitively this sounds good - after all, who wants to develop an API that is a bit wimpy - how can you measure and judge the power of one API over another? [...]

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Tips for returning IDENTITY values from INSERT

January 14th, 2007 · No Comments · ASP2, SQL

There’s a good article by Scott Guthrie here that describes the basics. Just scroll down to Tutorial 5 for the INSERT specific bit - it is pretty straightforward and there is no point my repeating it here.
One point to note, however, and why I wrote this particular post. The key step in getting this working [...]

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Determining row counts for all tables in a database

January 11th, 2007 · No Comments · ASP2, SQL

Here is a usful snippet if you want a way to get the number of rows in each table in your database. I use this in an admin-only page of the web application to provide some at-a-glance statistics. It is also really useful in unit tests for checking the correctness of business logic that may [...]

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Useful CSV reader

January 10th, 2007 · No Comments · .net, Software Development

To aid my unit testing I needed to populate a database with a load of test data. This data needs to be generated by some of the less technical guys on the project and so exporting CSV (Comma Separated Values) files from Excel seemed a sensible approach. So I then cast around for any existing [...]

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Don’t believe NUnit!

January 5th, 2007 · No Comments · ASP2

Just a quick note about a little problem I found using Nunit (2.2.9, but affects earlier revisions too).
After a bunch of edits to my project, I suddenly started getting messages from NUnit GUI “could not load file or assembly nunit.core”. Try as I could, this would not go away. This included everything from reinstalling NUnit [...]

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Perforce server logging problem

January 2nd, 2007 · No Comments · Perforce, Software Development

When setting up a server it is often useful to enable one of the logging levels. The admin guide states that you need to do this:

p4 set P4DEBUG=server=2

which sets the server logging level to 2. You then need to restart the Perforce server.
However, if Perforce is running as a [...]

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Adding ASP Role tables to your own database

December 29th, 2006 · No Comments · ASP2

This is still work in progress, but I want to incorporate the user role management tables within my own database, as the concept of users and their distinct roles ties right in with the core business model of the new site.
The following link explains the standalone tool to create the tables:
ASP.NET SQL Server Registration Tool
Invoking [...]

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Gotcha on setting up a data connection

December 29th, 2006 · No Comments · ASP2, Software Development

This one gets me every time. When you set up a new data connection to a database running on a local copy of Sql Server Express, in the “Add Connection” dialog you need to prefix your machine name to the defaulted value of “SQLEXPRESS”. E.g. if the network name of your PC is called “devpc”, [...]

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