As a long-time PB developer, I have successfully created or maintained many PB applications for clients and for myself. Since day one, I was impressed with the ease with which applications can be created using PowerBuilder. Although I had been exposed to Visual Studio and other client/...

I've always been puzzled by the ability of some traders to consistently make money. A cynic would say that anyone who is able to profit in all adverse economic environments (recessions, depressions, etc.) is most likely able to do so because they are getting information that is not gen...

CLINQ v1.1 has been released. Some of you may have already downloaded some of the new builds, but here's a rundown of what the new release includes: Support for Continuous Aggregation. Now, in addition to being able to have your result sets automatically update themselves in response t...

Microsoft recently released the Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0 in order to allow 'developers to incorporate VB.NET Forms and Controls into their VB6 applications' (www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=934de3c5-dc85-4065-9327-96801e57b81d&DisplayLang=en).

Adobe Flex Builder has many convenient keyboard commands and hints that make your programming faster. But this is a list of Flex Builder shortcuts that I use on a regular basis

It's been a few months since Visual Studio 2005 was released. In that time you've probably seen and read quite a bit about generics. Unfortunately all those articles and presentations can leave you with the impression that generics are useful only in the context of collections (List, D...

If you work in a .NET environment you have probably come across Base64 encoded data. For example, Base64 encoding is used in ASP.NET for a Web application's ViewState value, as shown in Figure 1. Base64 encoding is also used to transmit binary data over e-mail. However, if you are like...

In this article, we're going to look at how DataWindow.NET technology is a simpler but more powerful way of formatting data in the presentation layer. We'll be taking a sample application provided by Microsoft for .NET and implementing it using DataWindow.NET technology.

Here's a question: If you write your application's code in an OO language - such as C#, VB.NET, or managed C++ - why not write database query and update code in the same language? It would certainly make life simpler, wouldn't it? At the very least, you'd only have to hold one language...

I've tried to make it a point to learn different programming languages throughout my career. It's not that I'm fluent in multiple languages (for example, I wouldn't call myself an Eiffel expert by any stretch of the imagination), but by learning about a language's features and ideas I'...

Writing code that runs quickly is sometimes at odds with writing code quickly. C.A.R. Hoare, computer science luminary and discoverer of the QuickSort algorithm, famously proclaimed, 'Premature optimization is the root of all evil.' The extreme programming design principle of 'You Aren...

Imagine you are coding a .NET application that must perform some logic when a CD is inserted into the drive. Unfortunately, there is no standard event visible to your application that gets fired when a CD is inserted. Windows knows when a user puts a CD in the drive, but how can it not...

Here are some tips on how to improve the performance of your .NET applications. In the old Visual Basic 6 world, string manipulation was a performance issue that many developers spent time dealing with.