code-u-like

... so haven't posted for a bit. But here's a quick movie about one of Microsoft's most famous applications : )

Last year I worked at a client site writing imports into the database for an Ascent CRM system. The import process was being implemented using Sql 2000 stored procedures. After getting used to a C# environment with source control and unit testing, working entirely in T-SQL was like going back to the 1970s. Still, the client had their reasons; although the job could have been done in C#, the charity in question figured that T-SQL would be cheaper to maintain in the long run, with programmers easier and cheaper to find. So during my months of retro programming, I stumbled upon a SQL-2000 feature I hadn't seen before ... the ability to concatenate strings from multiple rows of a results set without using a cursor. It works like this: The SET operator, as well as appearing before a SELECT statement, can also appear implicity inside a SELECT statement (and hence be used to set multple variables) like this: declare @name varchar(40) declare @id varchar(11) select top 1 @name = au_l

ASP.NET Panels are expected to render as <DIV> elements, but poking around with Firefox and FireBug the other day I was surprised to see them rendered as single-cell tables. It turns out that, by default, ASP.NET 1.x treats Firefox as a completely incompetent browser that can't even handle <DIV>s properly. Though this sounds like another strike in the browser wars between IE and Firefox, apparently it is an accident of the development schedule of ASP.NET 1.1. Firefox's usage expanded so quickly after its initial release, that ASP.NET's handling of it was quickly out of date. So, ASP.NET 1.1 treats Firefox as a 'downlevel' browser, and assumes it has only basic support for CSS, DOM and Javascript. Fortunately, this can be changed by adding a carefully-tuned <browserCaps> section inside the <system.web> section of web.config or machine.config. Get the <browserCaps> right, and ASP.NET will then treat Firefox as 'uplevel'. Note

Well, most developers seem to have blogs these days, so I thought I'd better start one. Quite often when I have a tricky problem or baffling error-message and I Google for an answer, I find it on a developer's blog or message-board. So thats another good reason for starting my own one. Hopefully I will come up with some interesting content and/or rambling.