November 2007 Blog Posts
Over the holiday, it's important in our tech world to keep a good perspective on the little things in our developer jobs that make our lives a whole lot easier and are relatively underappreciated:
Relational Databases- Can you imagine the pain of trying to keep your data valid without automatic relational enforcements? If you're like me and have had to fix systems that didn't use proper constraints, you know what i'm talking about.
Garbage Collection, Transactions, and other things that make me not have to worry (so much) about cleaning up after myself, leaving me to focus on the business value code.
Compiler...
The more I look into the LINQ features of the Framework, the more excited I get. In particular, LINQ to XML has an incredible amount of productivity when working with XML documents.
"But Eric, " I hear you say, "we can work with XML with existing framework items."
Yes and No.
The problem myself and others are faced with when working with XML is the sheer amount of choices. You have to learn when to use the XML DOM, XPATH, XSLT, and the various other means of manipulating XML. They all have their tradeoffs and benefits but they are all very different...
Frankly, I haven't seen much use of the struct in the coding libraries I've come across, yet every time I encounter a technical interview, the struct vs class question always seems to come up as a gotcha question. So for my inaugeral post on the Runtime I would like to quickly point out the difference between these two concepts, and why you may actually want to use a struct instead of a class in your application.
It's all about the memory
The most fundamental difference between a class an a struct is that a class is a reference type and a struct...
After years of helping to create the Codebetter community, it was time for a change, not only for my blog URL, but for the interests that I wanted to blog about. Having moved from pure development into the role of Application Development Manager, I feel I have a lot to say about the "soft skills" involved in IT and would like to split focus between the technical and the management and cultural side of companies. When Jay approached me about setting up his own site, I was very excited about it. We already have a talented staff of bloggers and...