December 1, 2004

CoDe Talks: Q&A with Steve Ballmer

CoDe (Markus Egger): Mr. Ballmer, There is so much written about offshore development these days?I know Microsoft has offshore development operations in various parts of the world…how is it working out, and what advice would you give to US software engineers that might enable them to remain valuable? Ballmer: As

Find the nth Maximum and Minimum Values in a Given Column

This SQL code retrieves the nth Maximum and nth Minimum values in the column specified in from the table . The argument will be accepted in the runtime by SQL: To find the Nth Max: SELECT * FROM a WHERE &N = (SELECT count(DISTINCT(b.)) FROM b WHEREa.=b.);

Understanding and Using .NET Partial Classes

ne of the language enhancements in .NET 2.0?available in both VB.NET 2005 and C# 2.0?is support for partial classes. In a nutshell, partial classes mean that your class definition can be split into multiple physical files. Logically, partial classes do not make any difference to the compiler. During compile time,

Partially Optional Function Parameters in VBScript 5.0+

As you know, VBScript doesn’t support the declaration of optional parameters in subroutines or functions. So, if you have a function declared as: Myfunction(p1,p2,p3), to simulate optional parameters, you’d have to call it like this: MyFunction “”,””,”Hi” However, did you know that VBScript doesn’t require you to provide all of

Use the “Service Locator” Design Pattern with the J2EE Architechture

This tip is an extension of a Design Pattern called “Service Locator” for the J2EE architecture. Generally, the “Service Locator” pattern returns a home object by merely accepting a string, usually a mapping for a JNDI name. This tip creates a pure factory for stateless session beans (a method which