Introduction My personal favorite class of the .NET Framework is the BackgroundWorker class. The BackgroundWorker class provides an easy way for a programmer to execute a time-consuming operation on a separate background thread while providing a simple way to communicate progress, completion and other information about the background operation to the thread which started the… Read More »
Looking back on this series, we have discussed both proper management of database related resources and how to protect and improve the performance of our applications through the use of Parameterized Queries (Prepared Statements). Since the primary reason for accessing a database is to read data from it, it would be a shame if we… Read More »
Introduction To begin, consider non-duplex Request-Reply services. In non-duplex Request-Reply services, the client sends a request to the server and the server in turn replies with a response to the client. Another noteworthy characteristic of non-duplex Request-Reply services is that the client is always the one to initiate communication between the two parties. In duplex… Read More »
In the first installment of this three part series I covered why properly managing resources related to database activity is so important. In this second part, I will discuss how using parameterized queries (also known as prepared statements) will improve the performance as well as increase the security of your application. Again the examples are… Read More »
As a .NET programmer, how do you check if a bit is set within a byte? How do you set, unset or toggle a bit? How do you get the binary string representation of a byte? Well for most of those questions, the answer is to use the same bit-twiddling methods that C/C++ programmers are… Read More »
Many tutorials describing how to access MySQL databases in C# are typically missing a major point of emphasis or two. Stack Overflow alone is filled with questions where the author violates best practices in their code snippet. In this three part series, I would like to go over some major points of etiquette when using… Read More »
Previously I wrote about the basics of setting up and working with IronPython. In that post, I briefly talked about why one would want to use it in their .NET applications. I stated that the biggest reason to use IronPython would be to add dynamic business logic into your .NET application. However, my first post… Read More »
I first learned that I had a passion for programming via an undergraduate course that all Mathematics majors pursuing the Bachelor of Science option were required to take. The course used the Python programming language which I rather enjoyed using. When I heard that their was an open-source implementation of the language that was integrated… Read More »
Recently a curious intern at work asked why indexing in an array starts at zero. My explanation to him was that it pertains to offsets from the address of the start of the array. While this is an acceptable answer, it is not the only explanation as to why many programming languages (even those without… Read More »
Did your mother ever tell you that appearances aren’t everything? Well, she was wrong. When it comes to much of the user experience of software, appearances are everything. Imagine if you have a User Interface (UI) with a progress bar and you have an event that is triggered when the process monitored by the progress… Read More »