James Horan

In this day and age of cost-cutting layoffs and job insecurity, you've probably found yourself in some challenging situations. Recently, I found myself in the position of being the sole developer of a .NET application using SQL Server 2000. So I did my best to design a solid database using my limited knowledge of database design. It was around that time that I finally started to appreciate a good DBA! I had designed a database with about 20 tables, and for auditing sake, each table had two fields, DateCreated and DateModified, to track when each record was created and modified. I was then presented with a challenge: How should I populate these fields? Should I populate them in every insert and update routine I write? That sounded burdensome. A better idea would be to use... (more)

Get the Most Out of .NET

Here are some tips on how to improve the performance of your .NET applications. Use the StringBuilder Object Instead of Concatenation In the old Visual Basic 6 world, string manipulation was a performance issue that many developers spent time dealing with. In the .NET Framework, the StringBuilder (System.Text.StringBuilder) class is provided to greatly enhance the performance of string ma... (more)

Slaying the Documentation Dragon

Frequently, documentation gets lip service and not much else. Everyone who develops software will tell you how important good code commenting is to the maintainability of applications. But in the same breath they will tell you that they are rarely given the time to properly document their code. To assist the developer in this pursuit, the designers of C# and Visual Studio .NET have provi... (more)