We just received our Idea Paint that we are going to put on one of the walls in our new workout room. This reminded me of when we painted the main conference room in the office building I worked in. It was a big conference room with 2 little white boards that always had “Do […]
We are upgrading from SQL Server 2005 to 2012. There are a lot of features for developers that have been added over those 7 years. Here are some you might find useful. 1. You can assign a value to a variable when you declare it. Copy Text Copied Use a different Browser DECLARE @Status varchar(50)
SQL Server 2005 to 2012 Differences for Developers Read More »
From a scheduled program I wrote on my laptop, I wanted to turn on an electric wall outlet, which would then turn on the cat’s auto feeder. The wife said she didn’t trust this to work, so she needed a video showing the cat being fed. So I combined all the Z-Wave tools with some other
Auto Feeding the Cat with Video Confirmation Read More »
I wanted to do some home automation, and I wanted to write the code myself (I’m a software developer.) I looked into it and decided to use Z-Wave technology. I started by buying a USB Z-Stick for about $45 to allow my laptop to talk to the different devices. This can control up to 232
Programming Your Home Read More »
I have all the changes archived to archive table using triggers, but this doesn’t record anything when a row is deleted. I created a dedicated table to record the deletes. Copy Text Copied Use a different Browser SET ANSI_NULLS ON GO SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO SET ANSI_PADDING ON GO CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Deletes]( [id] [int] IDENTITY(1,1)
Recording Deletes When Using Entity Framework Read More »
I create archive tables to log all of the changes made to a table. The archive tables look like the base table with a few columns added. Then the base tables need a trigger to insert the old row right before a change. I used the stored proc below to generate the archive tables and
Generating Archive Tables and Triggers Read More »
Surprisingly, SQL Server doesn’t automatically create indexes just because you have a foreign key. So at the end of a development project, I just used the script below to generate the SQL needed. Copy Text Copied Use a different Browser select 'create index indx_'+t.name +'_' + c.name + ' on ' + t.name + '('
Generating Indexes for Foreign Keys Read More »
I have an application with the following as part of the data model: So an Account can have many Users and a user can belong to many Accounts. I wanted to show the Accounts in a DataGrid along with the number of Users that were linked to that account like show in the 3rd column
Show Child Count in a DataGrid Read More »
I’ve seen this done a few different ways, but I think this is the best way because you can reuse it. Below is the converter. Notice the 2 public properties. Copy Text Copied Use a different Browser public class BoolToTextConverter : IValueConverter { public string TrueText { get; set; } public string FalseText { get;
Generic Boolean to Text Converter Read More »
We have the requirement that our passwords have to change every 90 days. I wanted to automate this and it sounded pretty easy to do, but it wasn’t that easy. Why? Because there are a lot of rules for passwords. First, I have to store it in the web.config. So no XML special characters. quot
Generating Passwords Read More »
