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In our SQL queries here at work, we use the NOLOCK hint a lot. Not locking rows during reads is very important to us, and our transactions are seldom rolled back so the queries generally return data that's accurate enough for the tasks at hand. Now that we're starting to investigate LINQ to SQL , then...
Last night was our February meeting of the Albury/Wodonga .NET User Group - our first for 2008. In lieu of any presentations, we spent the night talking about each other's projects and goals for the year. It was a great discussion. AWDNUG's attendance has been dwindling of late (there were only six of...
Really happy with some code I put together for Comicster on the weekend. For any item in your collection, it's possible to "connect" it to Comicster's online database (hosted here at madprops.org). Once connected, you can quickly upload or download changes to synchronize that item with the online version...
Extension methods are really useful - no two ways about it. Being able to add my own methods to an existing class makes for some very readable code. Extension methods, however, are currently only instance methods. There's no syntax for defining a static extension method on a type rather than an instance...
In my latest WPF version of Comicster, I've been having some performance problems when trying to sort large numbers of issues. My collection of about 1,100 comics is pretty measly when compared to those of serious collectors', and one file I have from a user has about 10,000 issues in it. When I first...
Everyone familiar with IEditableObject ? Go read about it. I'll wait. So by now you know that IEditableObject is an interface that gives you three methods: BeginEdit, EndEdit and CancelEdit. The idea is that before you bring up the editing UI for your object you call BeginEdit, and then if the user completes...
My Xbox 360 returned to me last night, and there was much rejoicing. As Euan had suggested, there was a card offering one month's free Live subscription included, which was nice. All told the whole repair situation took less than ten days (less than eight business days) and only one phone call. Not only...
Some scaled-down screenshots of my latest WPF version of Comicster. Right now I can open and save files and browse around in the collection, but I can't modify the collection at all. Some points of interest: The tabs at the bottom-left represent Collection, Publishers, Creators and Characters. Switching...
I had an interesting design problem in Comicster over the weekend, and I thought I'd document my solution here. In Comicster you categorise your trade paperbacks and titles in folders, and folders can also contain subfolders. Therefore, the Folder class has three properties: Folders, Trades and Titles...
After experiencing intermittent freezes for a while now, my Xbox finally displayed the "red ring of death" on the weekend. Mine was a weird situation, because my 360 only ever played up (freezing, not powering down properly) while my HD DVD add-on was plugged into the USB port. Unplugging the...