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Writings of Urda

Your friendly West Coast Software Engineer

Blog Post Archive

Build Objects With Interfaces

Being able to drop certain chunks of code from one piece of software to another piece of unrelated software is a powerful thing. Not only does this save time, but it will also allow you to build a small library of tools you find useful in all your applications. Interfaces ... Read More

Disable You Have Created a Service

When you create a basic WCF service hosted through IIS, you are greeted with a generic page informing you that “You Have Created a Service”. This is useful since it provides to the developer two critical pieces of information. First it lets you know that the service is up and ... Read More

Debugging With Conditionals

So you have your program written out, and you have met all your goals. You are so confident that the program is ready, you rip out the debug statements and other debugging related functionality from it. You fire up the program and feed it the initial values and BAM nothing ... Read More

C# Classes Versus Structures

There are a few situations where a C# structure will provided better performance than a C# class and other times a class will be faster than a structure. The reason for this is how C# is handling both of these in memory during program execution. Let’s talk about classes first. ... Read More

A Simple Way to Check for a Table in Access

As I worked on another project today, I came across a simple dilemma. The project reads in a small Microsoft Access database (also known as a .mdb file) into memory. It then queries said database with a simple ‘SELECT foo FROM bar…‘ statement and pulls the results into the program. ... Read More

Add Descriptions to Enumerations

Enumerations in C# allow you to group common constants together inside a piece of code. They are often used for determining a system state, flag state, or other constant conditions throughout the program. Usually enums are not formatted for “pretty” displaying to the end user. However you can use a ... Read More

Access Common Methods Using Extensions

There will be times when you are using a third-party library or some other “black box” software in your project. During those times you may need to add functionality to objects or classes, but that addition does not necessarily call for employing inheritance or some other subclass. In fact, you ... Read More

A XAML DataGrid Quirk

Everyone knows how amazing XAML is to create flexible and beautiful GUI’s for various applications. XAML provides a wonderful interface to building a simple grid of data (much like an Excel spreadsheet) with the DataGrid namespace. I was working on a DataGrid object in one of my projects today, and ... Read More