codefrenzy

Macro Photography – Take 1

Annie — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:59:36 +0000

For Christmas, my awesome partner Jason got me a Tamron SP AF 90mm f/2.8 Di Macro 1:1 lens for my Nikon D90. I really enjoy taking close up photos of insects and flowers and although the kit lens I already had does a pretty good job at it, a macro lens can do much better. [...]

SQL Server Performance Tuning

Annie — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:49:42 +0000

Things in the “software development” world have changed a fair bit over the last 10 years. In the past, developers used to have to think carefully about the SQL they wrote, making sure that they used well optimized stored procedures on well designed databases with the right indexes on the right columns because let’s face [...]

How asynchronous is SmtpClient.SendAsync?

Annie — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:50:41 +0000

In a previous role, I was tasked with writing a newsletter email sender. How hard can this be, I thought to myself, and set off to complete my mission. Initial Thoughts We were probably going to be sending tens of thousands of emails at a time so although I figured I’d need to use some [...]

ASP.NET Response.Redirect

Annie — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:17:12 +0000

In ASP.NET web applications, the Response.Redirect(string url) method is often used to control the flow of an application (both user browsing and logic) by redirecting the client to a different URL. For example, on a page that requires an authentication user, it is quite standard to first check if the user is logged in and [...]

Localization and skinning in ASP.NET MVC 3 web applications

Annie — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 19:03:06 +0000

Working in Europe has introduced me to the world of localization and skinning web applications. Not only do we have to support several different locales for the same web application, but in some cases, depending on the host url, the site should be skinned completely differently. A common reason for needing to do this is [...]

My Running Log

Annie — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:55:03 +0000

I’ve been a member of several gyms over the years but in all honesty, I’ve never been very good at actually going to them. I start off pretty good but after a few weeks I lose interest and like most people, my gym gear sits in the corner of my room gathering dust. Excuse after [...]

What I learnt at University

Annie — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 23:00:49 +0000

I had a great time at uni. I spent 4 years working my ass off trying to do as well as I could in my sometimes-impossibly-hard Comp Sci and Maths courses. Sure, I also met a lot of fun people, did a lot of fun stuff, held down a part-time Comp Sci tutor job and [...]

Software deployment processes

Annie — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:54:09 +0000

During my career as a Software Engineer, I have seen a variety of different approaches to ‘deployments’. This is one aspect of the software development life cycle that wasn’t touched on at all during my 4 year Computer Science degree and seems to be a point of contention for a lot of software companies. In [...]

Deploying ASP.NET MVC 3 to IIS 6

Annie — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 07:35:32 +0000

I recently built a new ASP.NET MVC 3 (.NET 4) web application which unfortunately has be hosted on Windows Server 2003 running IIS 6. Guess I’d figured getting it running on IIS 6 would be as easy as installing .NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 3 on the server… but it wasn’t. This isn’t a step [...]

A generic implementation of the Repository Pattern for LINQ to SQL

Annie — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:39:29 +0000

Back in 2008 I started working on a project at home which never really went anywhere. It’s still lingering around in the back of my mind but I just gotta find the time to work on it. At the time I figured I could use the project as a learning experience. It was going to [...]