kebabShopBlues

Today I’m going to cover some basics in C# - the difference between Reference and Value types.

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(and how your Client can Delight You)

Yesterday’s post reminded me just how much value I have begun to place in my working-relationship with our on-site client-liaison. She has a fiery temperament, is outspoken and very different from me, differences which I have come to appreciate. And let’s not forget, in an otherwise all-male office, she is a she and, sad but true, it really does help to have a little bit of a mix of the sexes.

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Some time ago I wrote about the joys of working for my new employer, in a low overhead environment. I think I can now say with some certainty that this has become a confused and un-managed environment. We’ve grown quite some way since I wrote that entry, and this has been a substantial contributor to the situation.

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I’ve been thinking about some basic ideas recently related to the design of a Object Layer for the C#/.Net project that I’m working on. Actually, it’s not a proper OL really, more of a set of enhancements to the Data Access Layer generated with MyGeneration for the Gentle framework. Of course, this is all rather old-hat for anyone who’s utilised Datasets in .Net 2 or later, but there you go.

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This short blog is to recommend two tools for Firefox that have proven valuable to me on those occasions when I have been doing website development - especially with CSS, but also now with JavaScript. As web-dev is not really my main role, I’m confident that I’ve only scratched the surface of what they can do.
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I’ve been a little bit quiet on the blog front recently because I very happily have got a job as a C# developer, after quite a bit of time away from work by choice… and then a fairly long job search. One of the fantastic things working for a small consultancy (<10staff) was proven in the first few days; I had coded some small enhancements to the system… and they had gone live! Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing from my previous post, I wanted to write about something that I have found to be a bugbear - the idea that functions or methods should have a single exit point.

But first, another quick reminiscence of my days programming mainframes with PL/I. There were no internet connections to the machine, data came in on tapes. Someone who wanted to get their own nefarious data onto our machine would have had to intercept a driver, get the relevant tape, take it to a conveniently located mainframe resource, load the data off the tape, insert their own data into the records, put it back onto tape, drive it to our office with a driver with an appropriate security pass… and so on. And I didn’t even mention knowledge of record formats or file validity checks and so on!

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I’ve been thinking a lot about coding style recently. I must admit that I have probably always tended to code in a way that would be considered to be verbose by many programmers. Although I learnt to program by myself, I benefited from an extensive professional programming course in PL/I (which doesn’t date me too much, but it does date the machines I was working with!)

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Just a quick note to say that I have just written and released a tutorial on getting C# .Net v2 to work with an Oracle database. It has its own page which is here.

During the last week, I’ve attempted to install Oracle Data Access Components 10.2.0.2.20 several times, and to describe it as a headache would be an understatement. I think that a number of the problems I experienced may have been caused by my computer’s registry being a bit of a manky state, possible historic installs of things like their development suite, and so on.

Anyway, this post is intended as a note-to-self of the problems I encountered and the eventual solutions; most of which I did find on the web but somehow the final puzzle pieces evaded easy web-search finds. And again, because I have recently tried to stop my normal usage of an Admin level account, this may have contributed further problems - it certainly added hassle factor to the whole process.
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