Mouse Suites Aren't So Sweet

Visual Studio, Microsoft Office, and many other applications making use of docked windows are subject to the rigors of "helpful" mouse software suites, kindly loaded by computer manufacturers.  Such manufacturers include HP / Compaq, IBM / Lenovo, and others.

Visual Studio Wears Sabots

This post addresses the problem of compiler errors reporting missing namespaces for solutions composed of multiple projects.

15th century Netherlands textile laborers were believed to throw their wooden shoes, called sabots (sah-BOW), into the cogs of mechanized looms, to prevent their occupation from being rendered obsolete by automated processes; hence, the supposed root and historical context of the word, sabotage.

One would expect Visual Studio to be an industrious little worker, and that it is.  In fact, it works so hard to make our development experience easier, it often runs right out of its clogs, which then fall deep into the whirling cogs of the .NET Framework.  In some cases, Visual Studio sabotages a project, resulting in the following symptoms:

Efficient Use of Nullable Types

I saw a brief post about nullable types, today, and realized (not by fault of the post itself, rather through my own experiences) that a surprising number of .NET developers either don't know they exist, don't use them correctly, or don't use them efficiently.  Furthermore, nullable types were a topic of the C# class I just finished conducting.

Joining SQL Server Tables on Composite Column Values

I am working with a database server that hearkens from the not-too-distant past, where disk space was extremely costly.  It made sense to combine several fields (columns), to make the file (table) more compact.  The values were split and evaluated by mainframe code, which was less costly, because the logic and database were on the same machine.  These are the fiery brimstone of relational database hell.