.NET (C# / VB)
.NET is great, and I cover it a lot in my blog posts. SQL Server and .NET make such a great team that it can be tough to discuss one without the other.
A common mistake beginners make when working with SQL is trying to format things at the database layer. I've covered that quite a bit in various blog posts, but I've only touched upon another similar issue which I feel is equally as important and also very often mishandled. read more...
A question I see very often in the SQLTeam forums is how to return data in a summarized form by concatenating a list of values into a single CSV column. This can be done fairly easily in T-SQL, but as the formatting and concatenation requirements becomes more elaborate, be sure to ask yourself: Am I forcing presentation code into the database layer? read more...
In my SQLBulkCopy article, I mentioned that you can quickly copy data from anything that implements IDataReader to a SQL Server table using SQLBulkCopy (new in .NET 2.0). In this SQLTeam forum post, Jesse Hersch (jezemine) tells us that SQLBulkCopy only actually uses 3 methods of the interface. This means that it is very easy to quickly create your own custom class which implements this interface to bulk copy pretty much any type of object collection or array to a SQL Server table.
I had to do some data clean up the other day, and really needed some regular expression replacements to do the job. Since .NET has a great RegularExpressions namespace, and since SQL 2005 allows you to integrate .NET CLR functions in your T-SQL code, I thought I'd go ahead and experiment with creating a RegExReplace() function.
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Time for another exciting edition of the mailbag! This time: making an improvement to the C# Pivot function.
It's great to be able to put settings in the Web.Config file for my ASP.NET projects. The problem for me, though, is that when I use System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings(name) to return a setting that doesn't exist in the file ...
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Let's assume that for some reason you are not using Stored Procedures. While I can respect your choice in that regard, that doesn't mean that you cannot still use parameters when constructing your SQL statements at the client.
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I've been playing around with a handy tool for creating Word and Excel files called OfficeWriter that's pretty impressive.
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By default, the ViewState for ASP.NET DataGrids can be quite large, as it normally stores enough information to recreate the grid completely after a postback. Often, I have found that I need the grid to display a list of items with only paging, sorting, and some buttons that let you delete or edit (via another page) individual items.
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As promised in my last post, here is some performance testing to help you determine the performance benefits (if any) of performing your crosstabs at the presentation or code layer, as opposed to forcing SQL Server to do this.
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Mowser