Just a Pause in the Grand Journey
Today represents my last day here at Mercer for my second co-op. It sure has been a wild ride since I started in the early fall. I have met a ton of new people who all play important and critical roles here at Mercer, and have made even more friendships and relationships with my team members. There is so much on my mind, so in this post I want to share some of my thoughts with you.
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GUID, UUID, and You!
So let’s say you have a bunch of objects. Yeah, a bunch of random objects completely unrelated to each other. You need a simple system that will take the information about these objects and shove them into a database. Do you just create a simple int identification value? If you do that then how do you control the indexing across multiple database servers? A surefire way to do this is instead use some method to generate a unique ID no matter the instance. This is where a GUID/UUID will come in handy!
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Handling NULL Values in MSSQL Queries
When working with a given set of data in a Microsoft SQL server, you may have rows that contain one more NULL values for a given column. This may or may not impact your queries against the database, so it is important to understand how the database handles these values and how your queries should be designed around this consideration.
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Build Objects With Interfaces
The ability to create module software and code blocks is a great trait to have. Being able to drop certain chunks of code from one piece of software to another piece of unrelated software is a powerful thing. Not only does this save time, but it will also allow you to build a small library of tools you find useful in all your applications. Interfaces in C# is just one of many ways to build more modular objects that have similar behavior.
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Disable “You Have Created a Service”
When you create a basic WCF service hosted through IIS, you are greeted with a generic page informing you that “You Have Created a Service”. This is useful since it provides to the developer two critical pieces of information. First it lets you know that the service is up and running, second it provides basic code stubs to query the service with. While this may be fine for development, you might not want to display this page in production. Disabling it is not intuitive, but with some searching through the MSDN documentation I have found the preferred way of changing this page.
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Conditional Restrictions
The other day I showed you how to use conditional statements to build more elegant debugging code blocks. What I did not discuss in that same article was the restrictions that came with using conditionals. Today I’ll cover that.
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That’s Way Too Complex For Me!
I was assisting some younger CECS students during my tutor shift the other day. They were working on a basic C++ application for their introduction course into programming. One had issues understanding a few Object Oriented Programming concepts, the other was simply overwhelmed by the requirements of his assignment. So I spoke with them and shared a few of my tips about handling these situations and how to get the best out of them.
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Debugging With Conditionals
So you have your program written out, and you have met all your goals. You are so confident that the program is ready, you rip out the debug statements and other debugging related functionality from it. You fire up the program and feed it the initial values and BAM nothing works! If only you kept the debug calls! Well you can avoid this in the future by using conditions in your code.
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What Operating System is This?
You may, at one point, want to know the literal name of the operating system your program is running out of. Well this can be determined indirectly using the `Environment.OSVersion` information inside the .NET Framework. Normally if you call that by itself, you’ll can extract a string that reads like Microsoft Windows NT 6.1.7600 which isn’t all that useful. Well I’ve put together a simple little method to help you throw out a better string.
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System.String or string?
At one point you may have wondered to yourself “What in the world is the difference between `System.String` and `string` in regards to C#?” Perhaps you are worried about performance or memory usage between the two. Well, the answer may surprise you!
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