Stay Productive, Keep Thinking
There are times throughout life where you may be in a slow state. Perhaps you are waiting for that one TPS Report to come in from the other side of town. Maybe you are waiting for a certification or clearance from the business to proceed with a plan. Perhaps you need to just take a break from the task at hand and switch gears to something else to recharge. It is during these times that you can offer more value to your company and peers than any other time.
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Do the Impossible, Step By Step
You’ve got a problem, and you think you can solve it. This solution could be the next big product or service to hit the public, and you have just got to get the execution down. But where in the world do you start? Every amazing journey or adventure starts with a single step, so you need a few ways to really get those creative ideas flowing!
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Refactor Early, Refactor Often
…it may very well save your life! Well maybe not your life, but keep your mentality sanity intact and your stress levels low. A great piece of software will go through many iterations. What you once thought was a proper and understandable method or variable name may now represent something completely different! If you keep your code clean, organized, and efficient the task of upgrading it or repairing it will be so much easier.
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A Simple Way to Check for a Table in Access
As I worked on another project today, I came across a simple dilemma. The project reads in a small Microsoft Access database (also known as a .mdb file) into memory. It then queries said database with a simple ‘SELECT foo FROM bar…’ statement and pulls the results into the program. However, if you load an Access database that does not follow the expected schema, the program throws a nasty error and causes some logic interruption. I needed a simple way to check for a few table names before proceeding, so I whipped up a simple C# method.
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Give a GREAT Demo!
You finally made it! You worked long hours and many weeks to bring your small software idea for your company all the way to a “production ready” state. There is only one obstacle in your way, give a brilliant demonstration of your software to show how much value it adds for your employer to take advantage of. But what makes a good demo?
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The Road to Production
The journey a software project takes is a very long one. It begins with an idea, which becomes formulated, grows, is tested, and finally “put out to pasture” in production. Plenty of software projects never make it past the “idea” stage and die very young. But the projects that keep the momentum high and keep the challenges under control slowly work their way to production. Production is, usually, the final stage where a piece of software is released for client consumption. Today we will go over a very basic trail a particular piece of software may follow.
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Designing a User Interface Workflow
If an interface to a piece of software is simple, clean, and easy to follow you are likely to enjoy working with that program. When an interface is complex, difficult to navigate, or just doesn’t make sense it will frustrate you as an end user. You may be able to write the best back-end code of all time, but if you cannot write a wonderful User Interface to go with it you might as well give up. Today, I would like to discuss with you how to start creating a wonderful interface that is not only easy to follow, but controls the direction in which the user will follow.
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If You Make a GUI, You Better Use Asynchronous Calls
Sometime throughout one’s life they will encounter a not-so-well written piece of software. Maybe the user interface is confusing, maybe it does not do enough for the end-user, or perhaps it is not very good-looking. Generally we dislike certain pieces of software because they run slow or become unresponsive during tasks. A lot of times this is due to misconfigured computers or older computers. The other large chunk of time is because a developer setup work flow wrong. This will happen if the program is making synchronous calls in the middle of GUI operations.
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Don’t Always ‘return true’ if False is an Option!
I was working on one of Mercer’s internal applications today. I ran across an off the wall query from our QA team. They wanted to know what was the best way to confirm the information going into an Oracle database was actually written to the database. I told them it was simple SELECT FROM … query, but when I went to run the statement myself, I did not get the results I expected. Two major things were wrong in the codebase: one commits were not actually being made to the Oracle database. Two, a boolean method was configured to always ‘return true’ making it look like the commits actually occurred.
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Add Some Descriptions to Enumerations!
Enumerations in C# allow you to group common constants together inside a piece of code. They are often used for determining a system state, flag state, or other constant conditions throughout the program. Usually enums are not formatted for “pretty” displaying to the end user. However you can use a little C# magic to make them behave better with descriptions!
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