Archived articles - February 2015

Passing complex data to and from stored procedures has always been a tricky one. The most elegant way to pass values to a stored procedure is to use predefined data types in SQL Server...read more

When working on an app you create all your stored procedures, functions, tables, view and other objects in a development database (or t least it should be like that). A small but annoying problem occurs when you have to migrate your stored procedures to test or production database. Imagine during development you had let's say 20 stored procedures...read more

Managed Extensibility Framework or MEF is a library introduced in .NET Framework 4 which allows developers to easily create plugin based applications. It lives in System.ComponentModel.Composition namespace and before start working with MEF reference to this assembly needs to be added in a project.It is basically an implementation of IoC (Inversion of Control) pattern with few core functionalities such as assembly loading...read more

I don't work with random values very often but recently I had to write some small function that returns random value from an array. It sounded like a good idea to write it as an extension method to make it reusable for other projects. ...read more

Basically all Dictionary collections in .NET internally implement Hashtable wrapped, so in terms of mechanism they are pretty much the same. The difference is that Dictionary exposes strong types while Hashtable uses object-object keyvalue pair which is much harder to work with because you need to know what is the actual type of the object stored in a key or value. Often casting will probably be required...read more

In many cases serialized data is returned in a form of string although the actual type of data is different. The problem begings when you want to use data in it's original type becaus direct cast is not allowed in C# as it is in VB.net. This is why you have to use TryParse and safely parse the value to it's original type...read more

If you often have projects which setup is pretty much the same you might consider creating ProjectTemplate for Visual Studio.It speeds up development for the project setup, adding references, default configuration .config, content files... Before you start make sure that you have installed Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 SDK (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40758) and Nuget Package Explorer (http://npe.codeplex.com/)I also attached a small dummy project just to help understanding what is written in this article.Skipping to hands on code is always more helpful and faster for me to, so if you are bored by reading, download the attached .7zfile and explore it...read more