Being a professional in the fast paced IT world we constantly have to learn something new. In the beginning, you probably learn your first frameworks in a classroom setting with a professor or instructor working off of an established syllabus, but this pattern does not hold for long. For a variety of reasons, you eventually start learning on your own. ......

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Modern thinking on web design is shunning the much loved table tag in html. The most compelling reason is to make it easier to accommodate responsive designs, but there are additional reasons as well. For many the last bastion for the table is when displaying a list of records, after all tabular data should still fill at home in a table, butt if you ......

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I was thinking about some of the confusion that springs up from time to time over how Microsoft names the editions of it Operating Systems. We can all agree that Windows RT is a particularly bad name. Unfortunately despite their best efforts, none of their names have been overwhelmingly successful. There is always confusion over which version has which ......

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Most web sites will have an input form somewhere even if it is nothing more than a contact form. Any web application will have lots of input forms. Regardless of why you have the input form or what it is prompting form, we should strive to have them look as nice as possible to keep the user visually engaged. So here are a few CSS tricks we can use to ......

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Many of us with technical blogs started a blog as just a place to jot down stuff we figured out so that we could easily find it later. But if you have ever been thrilled to check the stats on your blog and see that 1,000 people have read one of your entries or been excited to see your blog mentioned on twitter, or had a boost of confidence when someone ......

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Over the weekend I sat down with another book in the Succinctly series. I have wanted to learn more about Knockout.js for a while now. I approached this book knowing very little about Knockout.js, but I do know a fair amount about JavaScript, jQuery, etc. Turns out I am their target audience. If you need a book that will introduce and explain JavaScript. ......

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In a recent blog, I wrote about Building A Custom View Engine to Create Excel Files in MVC. In this blog, I skipped over the grammar that we might use in the View definition. I have had a few people email me to fill in this gap. If you haven’t already read this blog, I encourage you to do so before continuing. Most of the content here will assume that ......

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I just read this blog Programming Is Not for Everybody. I have to admit to being taken aback by the premise. I believe that in their heart of hearts everyone wishes that they could program computers. No it is not always a glamorous profession. It is often boring and tedious. It is almost always difficult to explain what you do. There are days when you ......

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If you use LINQ to retrieve data and display this data in a grid, you may have come across the problem of allowing the user to control how the data is sorted. Users always want to be able to sort data on their own. GridView makes it easy to wire up an event handler or trigger an action to handle the sorting. The problem is that such sorting is not necessarily ......

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I try to keep politics out of my technical blog, but I figured that as long as I keep the focus, narrowly defined, I guess we should be OK. We need to be careful reading too much into this slip of the tongue. I think the president as proving repeatedly that he is a fan of both franchises. I pretty sure that this is a humorous slip of the tongue and ......

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Recently I blogged about adding SQL Doc Documentation to you Application. This makes it easy to keep your documentation visible and more likely current. I wanted to do the same thing with my code documentation. I wanted to leverage the work taken to add XML comments and add even more visibility. There are already tools readily available to convert these ......

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In a recent blog post, we talked about using SQL Doc to stream line documenting your database. This tool makes it a lot easier to put the documentation close to the source so that it is more likely to stay current. Another problem with documentation like this though is its visibility. If you squirrel it away on a file server somewhere, it is easily ......

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New article on Simple Talk exploring various ways to build dynamic queries with LINQ Some of the examples are fairly straight forward, but in the end, I step you through creating complex queries from scratch using reflection and Expression Trees. Expression Trees are the neglected corner of DotNet voodoo. Hopefully this will shed some light on this ......

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The nice folks at Syncfusion reached out to me last week to tell me a little bit about their Succinctly series of books. As they describe the concept, their goal is take 500+ pages of content and distill it down to 100 pages of essentials. I was intrigued but apprehensive with visions of “For Dummies” books running through my head. So I looked through ......

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I don’t really like to toot my own horn, but I am not above shining the light on someone doing it for me. Ein Gedanke has written a wonderful review of the book that I co wrote.http://blog.fabse.net... I thoroughly enjoyed reading his review. After reading his review, feel free to wander ......

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