Joseph Fluckiger's Blog

This is pretty cool. This week Codeplex changed it’s Start a Project page and added a section which I had suggested. I guess they are listening to me. :) You can read my suggestion I made back in Dec 2008 in the discussion forums to . You can also watch a Channel 9 video describing the feature starting at 5min. The suggestion was simply to allow donation links on Codeplex project sites. My Codeplex project SharePoint SUSHI has been on Codeplex since November 2007 and was one of the early projects posted on Codeplex. It has been downloaded 17,000 times. I love the comments on the latest version, they are awesome: Probably the most useful free SharePoint tool out there! Saved me hours of work many many times. Some really innovative features (e.g. copy list view). Great stuff! Please keep it up. Thanks for sharing the results of your hard work!. Greg by Greg_O on Mar 9 at 7:22 AM Some great functions. Definitely going to use that tool often in the future. ...

  This is an excellent article describing when to use float and decimal . Float stores an approximate value and decimal stores an exact value. In summary, exact values like money should use decimal, and approximate values like scientific measurements should use float. Here is an interesting example that shows that both float and decimal are capable of losing precision. When adding a number that is not an integer and then subtracting that same number  float results in losing precision while decimal does not: DECLARE @Float1 float, @Float2 float, @Float3 float, @Float4 float; SET @Float1 = 54; SET @Float2 = 3.1; SET @Float3 = 0 + @Float1 + @Float2; SELECT @Float3 - @Float1 - @Float2 AS "Should be 0"; Should be 0 ---------------------- 1.13797860024079E-15   When multiplying a non integer and dividing by that same number, decimals lose precision while floats do not. DECLARE @Fixed1 decimal(8,4), @Fixed2 de...

  I've been going certification crazy this year as I've passed 5 certification tests so far. Along the way I've picked up a few tips that might be of interest to someone looking to study for and take a Microsoft Certification exam. Trancender is a win forms app installed locally, so don't need to be connected to internet. Measure up is a web app. Both Measureup and Trancender are seriously out-of-date applications. It is embarrassing that they test your .NET skills and yet the skills of the programmers who wrote these tools is seriously lacking/out-of date. No cut and paste available in Trancender. This makes it hard to try out source code contained in the practice questions and descriptions are more generic than Measureup. For each question Measureup tells you why the right answer is right and the wrong answer is wrong, which helps you understand the way the question asker is thinking and what they are trying to teach or the point they are trying t...

Have you ever worked on a system where someone decreed that all database calls must be Stored Procedures, and ad-hoc SQL is strictly forbidden? I have and it leads to incredible development pain.   Let me first say that I have written many awesome 100+ line stored procedures. Stored procedures are definitely a good thing when writing complex queries. TSQL and Stored Procedures are fantastic. However, I think that the optimal decision is to use a mix of both ad-hoc sql and stored procedures rather than just stored procedures.   Reasons that are given for the above decree and why they are no longer true: Security: SQL injection: Resolved by using parameterized SQL which eliminate SQL injection possibility. Granular security: If the app pool account is dbowner, then there is no additional security from applying security to each stored procedure (execute only privileges).   Performance:  (see performance testing section be...