Daniel Read's blog

Unfortunately, one of the most annoying SSIS bugs did not make the cut for the SQL Server 2005 SP2 bug fix list: namely, when you add additional output columns to a Derived Column Transformation (and maybe other kinds as well) that is upstream from one or more Union All Transformations, the new columns you add get "stuck" behind the Union All transformations--that is, they do not show up as input columns in the Union All, and consequently do not flow past the Union All.

This post describes some initial troubles I had inserting into a SQL Server table with an Identity-based PK with SSIS while keeping the surrogate PK values from my source data, which happily led to a solution suggested by commenters to the original post.

All this puts me squarely in the programming mainstream, but there's no getting around the fact that people persist in seeing my world as less worthy of respect. I've learned to live with it, even embrace it, though early on in my programming career I was somewhat insecure about it.

In my work over the years that I have continually strived for the ideal structure of a lookup table. I must have designed hundreds of them by now in at least four different RDBMS engines. I may have finally arrived at a structure I really like, so I thought I would share it, with the hope that other people may benefit from adopting it, or even better, suggest improvements to the design.

What do you think? Are there fundamental lessons here that software designers and companies should be heeding? Are there some products or manufacturers that got this *right*, who have not experienced difficulties with the great 2007 DST transition? If so, what can we learn from their example?

Recently I had occasion to write a moderately complex component that used "automation" (using the old fashioned COM term) to communicate with the Microsoft Office Excel application installed on the same computer. In this post I share several tips and tricks that may help you in your Excel automation adventures.

Some people have asked us, "You've started a book publishing company? Huh? Why would you do that? I thought all the publishers are going out of business." These articles do a great job of describing why we think there is a future for new publishers to succeed by embracing the change happening right now.

Editor Dan Read belatedly reminisces about the recent passage of the five year anniversary of developer.*, considers where we are today, and speculates on the future.

Author Ed Yourdon is working on a third edition to his well known book about agonizingly bad software projects, Death March. Mr. Yourdon has also recently wikified one of his classic books, Modern Structured Analysis.

After learning that you really don't want to try using the DataGridView in unbound mode (just get your data into a DataTable and let binding do the heavy lifting--binding doesn't suck anymore!), I had to next learn that the DataGridView can be really, really slow after you get more than a trivial amount of data in it. Here are a few tips.

For some reason they left IsNumeric() and IsDate() functions out of .NET. I end up needing these is almost every non-trivial project. In this post I share C# and VB.NET versions of the functions I use. Your mileage may vary depending on your performance needs; if you're calling these thousands of times in a loop, then be sure to test them against alternate techniques. (Updated in light of new native IsNumeric() and IsDate() functions in VB.NET 2.0.)

I've found the BackgroundWorker to be very handy, but a little tricky to start using at first. I like that it has built-in support for reporting incremental progress for a long-running operation, and that it has a simple way of allowing a long-running operation to be canceled. And the big benefit, of course, is that your form remains responsive to the user and the operating system as it runs on the main UI thread. But there are some subtleties I had to overcome that are not covered in the documentation, especially in the area of exception handling.

I remain behind the curve when it comes from the latest from Redmond, specifically Vista and the ".NET Framework 3.0" (the latter being a choice of name I'm still not sure I understand). I have not even seen Vista in person yet, and I'm only just now having some real fun with "old fashioned" Windows Forms coding in C# 2005, and Windows XP works pretty damn well, so...

This morning I was reading the Oct 9, 2006 issue of The New Yorker magazine, which contains an interesting article called "The Score: How childbirth went industrial." The article is about the process of childbirth, and more specifically, the medical techniques and industry, for lack of a better word, that have developed around childbirth. When I started reading the article, I was not expecting to encounter an intriguing idea related to software development--but ideas often spring from unexpected sources.

I just came across something cool, Scott Rosenberg's Code Reads project, in which Scott presents a series of "core" reading material in the software field. Each suggested reading has a companion discussion (open to all to participate) to go with it.