"I've long looked at JavaScript as a second-class citizen in the programming world. Early on, it was the source of numerous security problems; it was a nice bit of glue to patch together HTML applications with a bit of styling, but nobody would use it for serious code; and so forth. Java, Ruby, Python, they were the languages for doing real work. "

"In SQL Server 2008 Microsoft has introduced a number of new date and time data types. One of these is the datetimeoffset data type. This data type includes an offset from UTC time as well as the datetime value and ensures that the datetime can be retrieved in UTC or a particular timezone based on this offset. There are also new functions to allow for conversions between different time zones using the new function SWITCHOFFSET(). "

"The Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Network (CDN) enables you to easily add popular JavaScript libraries such as jQuery to your Web applications. For example, you can start using jQuery simply by adding a

" Russ Miles discusses how to nurture the skill of learning by understanding it, valuing it and enhancing it in order to achieve an agile transformation within the organization. "

" April 2011 saw the release of a new version of Entity Framework 4.1; this blog article and samples of code contained in it have been correspondingly updated to match the new features that are now available."

"Dot Net Perls introduces lots of information about specific parts of the C# language, VB.NET, Windows Forms, and ASP.NET. Try typing your favorite keywords into the search box. For more coverage, please browse through the categories at the top of this page."

"I am using the Reporting Services Web Service because the Reporting Server is behind the firewall and not visible to the outside. Only my ASP.NET MVC web application front-end is visible to the outside world."

"The Crimson Consulting Group has just published a white paper worth reading: Comparing the Business Value of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and Oracle Database 11g, Perceptions vs. reality in the RDBMS marketplace (April, 2011). The traditional user-friendliness of a mid-tier product has matured in terms of scalability. Today, you will find SQL Server 2008R2 installations running on 256 core machines -- scalability is no longer an issue. Unfortunately, the traditional scalability product has not grown significantly friendlier to developers and users; this leaves SQL Server 2008R2 the clear value winner for both lowest development expense and total cost of ownership for operations."

Free "SQL Server Statistics" eBook and a trial of SQL Monitor

"SQL Server 2008 introduces two tracking features that enable applications to determine the DML changes (insert, update, and delete operations) that were made to user tables in a database. Before these features were available, custom tracking mechanisms had to be implemented in applications. These custom mechanisms often required schema changes to the tracked table or the use of triggers. Neither change data capture nor change tracking requires any schema changes at the source or the use of triggers."

Some interesting thoughts, although his TDD view smells a bit off. interesting comments though.

"I was writing a web application and wanted to find a regular expression to validate user's e-mail addresses, but when I searched for one I found dozens of slightly different variations of the same expression. Almost all of the posts were followed by comments describing examples of false-positives or false-negatives. But dispite all the criticism, I couldn't find a definitive "best" expression. So, I setup arrays of some of the most promising ones as well as a (hopefully) complete sampling of valid and invalid addresses. I think that it's better to accept a few invalid addresses than reject any valid ones, so I'm shooting for 0 false-positives and as few false-negatives as possible."

" HAProxy is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is particularly suited for web sites crawling under very high loads while needing persistence or Layer7 processing. Supporting tens of thousands of connections is clearly realistic with todays hardware. Its mode of operation makes its integration into existing architectures very easy and riskless, while still offering the possibility not to expose fragile web servers to the Net, such as below :"

" When the browser makes a request for a static image and sends cookies together with the request, the server doesn't have any use for those cookies. So they only create network traffic for no good reason. You should make sure static components are requested with cookie-free requests. Create a subdomain and host all your static components there. "

"This page provides a comparison of key capabilities between SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, Standard, Workgroup, Web and Express editions."

" Django may be built for the Web, but CouchDB is built of the Web. I've never seen software that so completely embraces the philosophies behind HTTP. CouchDB makes Django look old-school in the same way that Django makes ASP look outdated. -Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Django developer CouchDB's design borrows heavily from web architecture and the concepts of resources, methods, and representations. It augments this with powerful ways to query, map, combine, and filter your data. Add fault tolerance, extreme scalability, and incremental replication, and CouchDB defines a sweet spot for document databases. "

"jQuery 1.6 is now live and available for consumption! We're quite proud of this release, it includes a major rewrite of the Attribute module and a number of performance improvements."

"Evently is a jQuery plugin designed to take the repetition out of writing event-based applications. This page collects documentation and tutorials for using Evently, both inside and outside of CouchApps."

" Reflection, like it or not, it is inevitable that eventually you will have to write some code that involves looking at the members of a type at runtime (rather than at compile time). Maybe you are trying to write utility validation / serialization / ORM code, or maybe the interesting property / method is specified at runtime in a configuration file or from the database. Whatever the cause, it is likely that at some point you've written code involving GetType() - something like:"

"WAI-ARIA, the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite, defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. It especially helps with dynamic content and advanced user interface controls developed with Ajax, HTML, JavaScript, and related technologies. Currently certain functionality used in Web sites is not available to some users with disabilities, especially people who rely on screen readers and people who cannot use a mouse. WAI-ARIA addresses these accessibility challenges, for example, by defining new ways for functionality to be provided to assistive technology. With WAI-ARIA, developers can make advanced Web applications accessible and usable to people with disabilities."