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? [...]
Entries Tagged as 'programming'
Thoughts on a ‘Powerful’ API
April 18th, 2007 · No Comments · Software Development
Tags: opinion·programming
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 [...]
Tags: programming·tips
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 [...]
Formatting code in WordPress
January 11th, 2007 · No Comments · Blogging
What a pain in the rear! WordPress appears nice as a blogging tool, but my attempts to format some code snippets was painful beyond belief. Every time I pasted some code in and surrounded it with the code tags, the generated HTML had extra paragraph markers and line breaks, and screwed up the position of [...]
Tags: programming·Wordpress
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 [...]
Tags: c#·programming·unit-testing
Adding ASP Role tables to your own database
December 29th, 2006 · No Comments · .net, ASP2, SQL
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 [...]
Tags: programming