Category Archives: Uncategorized

Singular Vs Plural table names

Posted on Friday, 23 September, 2011 by Colin Mackay

A while ago I blogged about whether to make table names singular or plural. The subject raised itself again recently in the office after Microsoft’s Entity Framework makes some pretty odd decisions when converting from Plural to Singular form. (According … Continue reading →

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Wordle – Recent words

Posted on Saturday, 20 August, 2011 by Colin Mackay
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Building a tag cloud with LINQ

Posted on Saturday, 2 April, 2011 by Colin Mackay

I have a set of blog posts that I’m representing as a List of BlogPost objects. A BlogPost is class I created that represents everything to do with a blog post. In it there is a list of all the … Continue reading →

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Tasks that create more work

Posted on Friday, 1 April, 2011 by Colin Mackay

I’m creating a program that parses a web page then follows the links and then parses the next set of web pages to eventually build a picture of an entire site. This means that as the program runs more work … Continue reading →

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Using semaphores to restrict access to resources

Posted on Wednesday, 30 March, 2011 by Colin Mackay

I’m in the process of building a small data extraction application. It uses the new Parallel Extensions in .NET 4 in order to more efficiently extract data from a web service. While some threads are blocked waiting on the web … Continue reading →

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What a waste of money by Currys (but win for GAME)

Posted on Friday, 25 March, 2011 by Colin Mackay

As the end of last year, I was at a Microsoft event where we got to see a number of new Microsoft technologies. At this event I got my first chance to have a look at the XBOX 360 Kinect. … Continue reading →

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Parallelisation in .NET 4.0 – The concurrent dictionary

Posted on Thursday, 24 March, 2011 by Colin Mackay

One thing that I was always conscious of when developing concurrent code was that shared state is very difficult to deal with. It still is difficult to deal with, however the Parallel extensions have some things to help deal with … Continue reading →

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A quick intro to the HTML Agility Pack

Posted on Tuesday, 22 March, 2011 by Colin Mackay

I want a way to extract all the post data out of my blog. To do that I’m building a little application to do that, mostly as an exercise to try out some new technologies. In this post I’m going … Continue reading →

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Table names – Singular or Plural

Posted on Wednesday, 2 March, 2011 by Colin Mackay

Earlier this morning I tweeted asking for a quick idea of whether to go with singular table names or plural table names. i.e. the difference between having a table called “Country” vs. “Countries” Here are the very close results: Singular: … Continue reading →

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Parallelisation in .NET 4.0 – Part 1 looping

Posted on Tuesday, 8 February, 2011 by Colin Mackay

In an upcoming project we have a need for using some parallelisation features. There are two aspects to this, one is that we have to make multiple calls out to a web service that can take some time to return … Continue reading →

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