ObjectSharp

I'm just passing along some information that has been making the rounds (I found it on Guy Burstein's blog). If you attempt to install SQL Server 2008 on a machine that has Visual Studio 2008 installed, it will fail. The requirement is to have VS 2008 SP1 installed, an update that is still about a week away from release. And you need the 'real' ...

Dare Obasanjo had an interesting post yesterday on the Second System Effect in software development. For those who are unaware, the second system effect is a term first coined by Frederick Brooks in The Mythical Man Month. It deals with (in general) the idea that the second system designed/implemented by anyone is typically over-architected, with ...

This post is basically a reminder to a future me. The client I'm working with right now (basically an ISV) is using SQL Express as part of their project. And included in their database are a number of CLR stored procedures. In other words, the stored procedures are written in C#. While a little unusual, this is not particularly extraordinary. The ...

ObjectSharp has been growing quite steadily for the past little while. But winning a couple of recent contracts have begun to strain our seemingly unending supply of high-end talent. For this reason (and to get some fresh blood and ideas into the company), we are now actively searching for associates. If you're immediately available, we do have a ...

I have recently had the opportunity to work (once again) with Oracle. Specifically, I had to create a mechanism that would, based on configurable settings, update either a SQL Server or an Oracle database. In and of itself, this is not particularly challenging. Not since ADO.NET implemented a provider model using the Db... classes that are part of ...

Recently, a question regarding the cost associated with migrating from VB6 to VB.NET was asked by one of our clients. Since that is a question whose answer has a broader appeal than just to the asker, I thought I would replicate my response here. It should be stated up front, however, that I don't normally recommend a migration from VB6 to .NET. ...

With all this heat, I almost wrote "perspiring". Why not beat the heat, and stay cool inside while watching these web casts from MS Canada targeting aspiring architects. With the predicted shortage in IT in the upcoming years, we're sure to see an influx of junior resources into our industry. This is a good opportunity for developers ...

Last week at TechEd I gave a talk about building data access layers with the Entity Framework. I covered various approaches from not having a data access layer at all, to fully encapsulation of the entity framework - and some hybrid approaches along the way. I gave the first instance of this on Tuesday and then a repeat on Thursday. To those ...

About a month ago, Live.com released an update to their search engine and I took it upon myself to write down my observations of Live as compared to Google. Although the features seemed to be a pretty good leap in many areas, I concluded that the only way to see which one was better was to change my default engine to Live.com for a week or two and ...

Are you a design & mac user in a Windows Development Shop? Are they eyeing your Mac and measuring your desk to outfit you with a new PC? Over your cold dead corpse I bet. No worries. You owe it to yourself to check out the Microsoft Expression Professional Subscription.  Yeah, you could run Bootcamp but then you'd loose the OS X & ...