I write this post with a mix of excitement and sadness. The exciting part is that I am helping form a new developer community site at http://www.TheRuntime.com . The sad part is that I will no longer be blogging at Codebetter. When Codebetter was first formed, myself and several other bloggers from DotNetJunkies...

It is undeniable that the blogosphere is becoming a prime time source of networking, information, and advertising. With this in mind, we've been watching the evolution of blogging. Authors like Scott Hanselman and Sahil Malik, business owners like Joel Spolsky and Eric Sink all are using the blogosphere...

There has always been a mini religious war between programmers about code layout/style and when to optimize. My personal take on this has been put more weight on readability and maintainability over highly condensed, optimized code. Here's a few thoughts on this subject: Don't optimize first In almost...

What's the difference? Here's a console application that shows one: Dim myObject As Object = Nothing Dim toStringTest As String Dim convertTest As String Try toStringTest = myObject.ToString() Catch ex As Exception Console.WriteLine("MyObject.ToString Error: " & ex.Message) End Try Try convertTest...

A common question I get from ASP .NET developers is how to quickly and easily set up forms authentication where the passwords in the database are not stored in plain text. It actually shocks me how many systems I've gone into on the database end and seen passwords for every account in the application...

So, I've recently finished Beta 1 of the local install of Easy Assets .NET and I started passing it to some of the beta testers (thanks to those companies that graciously accepted to test it). So far a few people have been into my code and I've received many compliments on how clean and nice the database...

I received a lot of feedback from yesterday's post and some people were a bit concerned by my sample code since the querystring being built only accepted matches on = or LIKE. "How do we do a NOT? What about aggregates". That, my friends, is where today's lesson picks up. Easy Assets .NET in its default...

Here's an example of what I love about the Domain Manager pattern I've developed in Easy Assets .NET as far as making things easily extendable for you developers out there. Let's say that we have a table of Employees. The table has the following fields: EmployeeID, FirstName, LastName, DepartmentID,...

I received a comment from my previous post from Joey asking the following: "In light of the recent Frans vs. Peter debates on SProcs vs. PQs (parameterized queries), I'm curious which route you took with Easy Assets? In your quote 'modify the sql to suit your needs' in #4 above, it sounds like you may...

I have recently been tasked with creating a 1,000 ft overview of Object Oriented concepts in the VB .NET world for a development staff whose experience is mostly in old school ASP and VB 6.0 Much credit to The Book of Visual Studio .NET , ISBN 1-886411-69-7 from No Starch Press written by Robert B. Dunaway...