Here's just an accumulation of random thoughts I've had over the last couple weeks. 1. First and most importantly, I'm running into the problem where I'm trying to build a monitoring system that hooks into the System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounter class and logs data (to be used for reporting...

warning: this post is based on highly ignorant beliefs and huge generalizations. I know that there already is a Microsoft Consulting branch, but the one I'm speaking of is completely made up –since I know nothing about the existing one. A company who seeks out a software consulting firm to...

In Part 1, Christopher pointed out that since we all spend a lot of time maintaining and fixing code, a good interview test is to have people fix up some smelly code. Since I couldn't possibly agree more, I wrote a smelly codebehind page as an example of the type of test you might ask a potential...

Introduction In the past, I've come down hard on ASP.NET for trying to be an all-in-one solution. Rather, I've come down hard on ASP.NET developers trying to make it into an all-in-one solution. ASP.NET is an unsurpassed language for enterprise development and other medium-to-large scale projects...

I'm always a little amazed when I hear of an employer who doesn't give a written test when hiring someone. I know it might take more time and I've often heard how some people don't work well under interview-pressure – but that's just tough luck. I swear to god, we have higher...

Here's the short version: This is only for inserting 500 rows into a 3 column table InnoDB really seems screwed on Windows platforms running 5.x - Certainly don't have anything conclusive, but I'd watch out For my very simple test, MySQL on Linux blew SQL Server 2005 on windows out of the...

Another day, another coding horror. *sigh* not how I wanted to start off this week. At least the problem isn't technical, but rather an embarrassing misunderstanding of a business rule – and of course the system's in production. It could be the client's fault for not being clear in the first place, but...

Over the weekend, I dug up an ASP.NET article I wrote a while ago and never put up anywhere. It was actually meant as a practical example of using HttpHandlers - which I've talked about before. Basically, the idea is to store of JavaScript into a store (I use XML). Have the JavaScript grouped up into...

Rational, which was bought by IBM awhile ago, sells a range of products aimed at large-scale enterprise development. Requirement management, bug tracking, source control, modeling, etc. There are two problems with Rational – it’s insanely expensive and insanely bad software. We had 2 full time Rational...

In a previous post, I talked about HttpHandlers - an underused but incredibly useful feature of ASP.NET. Today I want to talk about HttpModules, which are probably more common than HttpHandlers, but could still stand to be advertised a bit more. HttpModules are incredibly easy to explain, so this will...