Mark Newton
The free LINGpad not only allows you to test LINQ to XML queries as here but will also run C# and VB code for testing When trying to fumble my way around code I find myself creating several projects in Visual Studio just to test them out, I always start their names with ‘test’ so […]
In a previous article one of the issues I raised was the necessity of LINQ ( Language Integrated Query ) as yet another data query language. I very pleased to receive a large number of emails agreeing with my views and a few pointing out the benefits of LINQ over say SQL. It was interesting […]
The other day we needed to produce a web application that an administrator could use to produce a series of several thousand unique numbers and store them in a database. The reason for this was so that holographic serial number labels could be created, each with a unique id which would be attached to the […]
In a previous article I wrote about how to enable full text indexing on a SQL Server which would allow you to query large blocks of text stored in a database in a fast and very flexible way. A use for this would be if you were building a blogging type of web application. Often […]
A couple of enquiries cropped up the other week relating in different way to using foreign characters in web sites. Normally as long as you set the page encoding to ‘UTF-8’ all should be fine, but one of the enquires wanted a web site converted for display in Libya where the writing is in Arabic […]
At any of these previews of new programming technologies I always make myself a small bet that Microsoft will announce yet another new way of connecting to data sources. I was not to be disappointed this time. Finding a new way of dealing with data sets seems to be a long standing Microsoft tradition. Not […]
I am not alone in getting annoyed about incompatibilities between the way different products from the same company deal with data. I came across a particularly annoying problem the other day when having to write an import routine to take some comma separated data and bring it into a SQL database. Normally a simple job […]
Often with clients I find that they like to maintain their company data with Microsoft Access. However their web server will be running something like MySQL which is much better suited to handling the number of requests that might occur out on the web rather than using Access which really should be considered a desktop […]
In these days with almost all information being on the web there may seem little point in visiting any of the traditional shows like the ones held in Earls Court in London or the NEC in Birmingham. Is there even any benefit from the opportunity to network with the people on the stands since the […]
SmarterStats produces the reports you need to help monitor your web site’s position on the search engines Once your web site is up and running the work doesn’t stop there of course. It is important to monitor the traffic to your web site and for this a lot of people use Google Analytics, which is […]