I don't do much web development, but when I do I'm often amazed that Internet Explorer still seems to disregard some elements of the CSS standards as outlined by the W3C. To address this shortcoming, Dean Edwards has written a small, optimised Javascript library to make IE versions 5, 6 or 7 "behave like a standards-compliant browser". It makes IE understand various things like: pseudo classes parent > child adjacent + sibling attribute[value] - cool! max-height, max-width the "peekaboo bug" and lots more... Check out Dean's test page if you use IE but long for more. Or have all the developers that...

Instead, use this basic "natural language" elapsed time function in VB.NET. I use this simple function to show elapsed time in the user interface. It came about because although I believe it's useful to provide some feedback at the end of long-running processes, I was getting sick of strings like "Time taken: 456.6 seconds" which is indecipherable to real people. This VB.NET function returns a string like "less than 10 seconds", "under 1 minute", "around 4 minutes" which, as you can see, changes the unit of measure depending on how long the elapsed time is:    '''      ''' Returns an approximate, rounded string of the difference in seconds, minutes or hours between the passed      ''' start and end DateTimes (depending on how long the difference is), to return feedback to the user      ''' on how long a process takes to run.     '''      ''' The starting or commencement time.     ''' The end or finish time.     ''' A natural-sounding sentence fragment that can be used after an opening like "The process finished ...

We have an upcoming requirement to kick all users out of a database before running a backup. So I'm saving this script for future reference (thanks to Chris for posting it to the SQL Down Under List):CREATE PROC [dbo].[sp_SpidKill] @db VarChar(200) AS DECLARE @Tmp VarChar(10) DECLARE @spid VarChar(10) DECLARE @Kill VarChar(200) SELECT @spid = Min(spid) FROM master.sys.sysprocesses WHERE dbid = DB_ID(@db) WHILE @spid IS NOT NULL BEGIN SET @Kill = 'KILL ' + @spid EXEC(@Kill) SET @Tmp = @spid SET @spid = NULL SELECT @spid = Min(spid) FROM master.sys.sysprocesses WHERE dbid = DB_ID(@db) AND spid > @Tmp END Tags: sql server, database,...

Recently I downloaded BugTracker.NET, an excellent ASP.NET/C#/Sql Server open-source bug tracker developed by Corey Trager. Set up was very simple - just read the README file! I really like how flexible BugTracker.NET is. Below are 5 of the simple changes I made, to make the product better suit my needs. 1. Set a different background color for "Closed" Bugs"Closed" bugs are marked with status 5 (by default). You can enhance the built in background colors on "bugs.aspx" by checking for status 5 and setting a different background color in queries. First go to the "queries" page, and select edit on one of the...

Foolishly, unforgivably, when I first read Jimmy Nilsson's excellent book .NET Enterprise Design with Visual Basic .NET and SQL Server 2000 (Amazon) back in August 2003, I did not review it (short review: it was excellent, and I used some of his methods straight away - well worth the read). Now Jimmy has released a new book called Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns : With Examples in C# and .NET (Amazon) that also looks great. Even though I use Visual Basic.NET much more than I use C#, I'm still going to try and get this one. Tags: domain-driven design, jimmy nilsson, patterns,...