Deborah's Developer MindScape

Humans like to classify things, to find similarities in things, and to group them accordingly. Things with similar attributes (properties) and behaviors (methods) are grouped. In object-oriented terminology, the definition of the properties and methods that describe a particular classification is called a class. A class defines a particular object type. You can think of […]

Objects are things. People, companies, employees, time sheets, and ledger entries are all types of objects. In object-oriented terms, the word object is used to describe one specific thing, such as Sam Smith the carpenter at 3322 Main Street and the May 15th time sheet for Jessica Jones. [To begin with an overview of OO, […]

Today’s world of software design and development is all about managing complexity. Computer-savvy users want more and more features. Software products, such as Microsoft Word and Excel, set high expectations. The business environment requires software to react quickly to shifting corporate needs. And tools and technologies are changing faster than ever. It is easy to […]

One of the common requirements in working with Microsoft Word from .NET is to bold some text. This is often required to draw attention to specific words within the document. This code example highlights any instances of the word "was". It can be changed to instead highlight any word you desire. In C#: // Add […]

A code review is a formal process of reviewing source code with the goal of finding and fixing errors and improving coding techniques. It often results in both improved software quality and in enhanced developer skills. As part of my consulting services, many software developers and software development teams have hired me to perform code […]

The specifics of this class demonstrate how to build an alarm. You can use this class to build an alarm clock application, or to add an alarm feature into your application, similar to the Reminder feature in Outlook. OR you can just use this class as an example of raising events from a business object […]

Despite the fact that there is a free version of SQL Server called SQL Server Express, there are still applications that require using a Microsoft Access database. But since these are dwindling in number, there are few articles or posts devoted to accessing Access. This post (and my prior post that demonstrates how to retrieve […]

Despite the fact that there is a free version of SQL Server called SQL Server Express, there are still applications that require using a Microsoft Access database. But since these are dwindling in number, there are few articles or posts devoted to accessing Access. This post (and my next post that demonstrates how to update […]

In my prior post, I covered how to read a fixed length file into an in-memory DataTable. You could then work with the DataTable as desired to access the fields from the file. You could even bind the resulting DataTable to a grid or other control. But sometimes you just need to process the file […]

In my prior post, I covered how to read a comma delimited file into an in-memory DataTable. You could then work with the DataTable as desired to access the fields from the file. You could even bind the resulting DataTable to a grid or other control. But sometimes you just need to process the file […]