Free subscription to ASP.NET PRO magazine

Just got this forwarded from a friend...ASP.NET PRO is giving away a free 3 year/36 issue subscription. If you don't already get this magazine, I would recommend it. There tend to be some pretty good articles in there and ones that are pretty helpful. I believe this is simply a marketing push for ASP.NET PRO magazine.

Anyways, here's the link:

https://store.pentontech.com/index.cfm?s=1&cid=20024596&promotionID=20026142&code=

Progress Database - NextVal

Not sure how many people out there use the Progress database. I'm currently using it to connect a .NET 3.5 C# application to the Progress database using the Progress OpenEdge 10.1C driver.

Unfortunately, Progress does not support columns which have sequential numbers in it. In SQL Server or Oracle, you can specify a column's data type to be a bigint and an identity column. For instance:

CREATE TABLE dbo.Students (StudentID bigint identity(1,1),
StudentName varchar(20))


So in Progress, there isn't a such thing. Therefore, you need to set up a sequence in your database. Once you have set up your sequence, then in your code, you can do the following:

INSERT INTO pub.Students(StudentID, StudentName) VALUES (pub.sq_StudentID.NEXTVAL, 'Joe Schmoe')

The NEXTVAL function will retrieve the next value in the database for that sequence. I assume that it keeps track of it based on the sequence. To my knowledge, any sequence that you create is not tied to any database table. It simply resides as it's own sequence and keeps track of itself.

More information about the NEXTVAL function can be found on Progress' knowledge base website

Starting up my software blog

Hi to everyone reading this blog. I figured I would jump on the bandwagon and start blogging on things related to software development. I have been a software engineer for the past 7 years and counting and am currently serving as a senior software engineer in Richmond, VA.

My hope is that with this blog, I can accomplish some of the following...

• First and most importantly, I hope to help other software engineers/developers/designers just like myself throughout the software develop
• Help myself organize some of my thoughts on software development. In the future, I hope to write some articles that may cause some controversy and people disagree with some of the ideas that I discuss here. I think different views on how to develop software are so extremely important in the software development field (I'm sure I'll blog about this at some point).
• Blog about new and up-coming technologies. Though I currently focus on Microsoft and .NET technologies, I hope to write about other technologies as well, and upcoming topics regarding all things software.
  

Anyways, so here goes nothing. Please feel free to comment on my blog entries. The virtual software development community is a strong one, and I look forward to learning more about it from others, and hope to teach others a few things as well!