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Source Control. In my eyes, one of the best inventions of development. Software Developers have used it for years, and it allows them to easily develop in a team environment, and be less scared they will lose a change or not be able to see things they did historically. I have blogged a few times [...]

At my new gig, I am working on a project that is ASP.NET with an Oracle Database backend. Today I ran into an error. Data provider internal error(-3000) [System.String] What does this error mean? Heck if I know, its a generic error basically telling you that something is wrong with your connection to the database [...]

Dates are fun. See, by default most dates come out like 5/6/2008. But computers, and programs like them formatted as 05/06/2008. That way, all the dates, no matter what month or day, are all the same length, cool huh? Well, in Reporting Services, if you have a date field coming back in a dataset, and [...]

The other day, Microsoft came out with “Microsoft Pro Photo Tools” which allows you to geocode your photos. It is a pretty cool app, but there are some things that I wonder, like why didn’t they just build this functionality into Windows Live Photo Gallery? Anyway’s, with any new thing I download and play around [...]

I have been playing around with Pownce and their API. They offer HTTP Basic Authentication and OAuth authentication. I decided to give a go with OAuth since BASIC auth just seems, dirty insecure to me. I started digging around, and http://oauth.net/ has some good info. Under code there is a C# (CSharp) version – http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/csharp/  [...]

I was reading through some blogs this morning, and ran across this one, from my MSDN Feed. Here is my answer (I wanted to leave a comment, but it wasn’t working, and I figured it would be a good blog post anyways) Right now you can make an MFC app and it can run on [...]

So in two recent small little projects, I have needed to "time" things in code. Back in the day, it was using timespans, timers in windows forms, ticks, and just two dates and taking datediffs, getting the milliseconds or seconds, coverting to the time element you needed. Well, no longer do you have to hack [...]

An exercise in coding. Loading a text file to SQL. There are a billion different ways to do it, and depending on your source data format and such, you can parse the file a million ways too. But how fast can you get data from disk to SQL using .NET code? (VB.NET or C#) . [...]

Usually, in a company, there is a “development” department and a “IT” department, and usually the departments don’t really work together. Development is focused on delivering business value through coding applications for end users or B2B clients. IT is busy making sure the corporate network is humming along, and that other internal issues related to [...]

As of late I have been stuck in C++ world. MFC/Win32, pointers and HRESULT’s. Ugh. Earlier this week I got a chance to get back to C# and .NET (aka My Roots). I needed to create a class library for a project, basically from scratch, since there was no existing library created. I started to [...]