Ajarn Mark Caldwell Blog

Bringing Business Sense to the IT World…

PASS Summit 2013 Review

As a long-standing member of PASS who lives in the greater Seattle area and has attended about nine of these Summits, let me start out by saying how GREAT it was to go to Charlotte, North Carolina this year. Read more →

Go Big or Go Special

Watching Shark Tank tonight and the first presentation was by Mango Mango Preserves and it highlighted an interesting contrast in business trends today and how to capitalize on opportunities. <Spoiler Alert> Even though every one of the sharks was raving about the product samples they tried, with two of them going for second and third servings, none of them made a deal to invest in the company. Read more →

SQL Source Control Contest

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I have written several posts about how important I think it is to protect your source code, to version it, and in particular, all the aspects I like about Red Gate’s SQL Source Control product. Read more →

How to Manage Technical Employees

In my current position as Software Engineering Manager I have been through a lot of ups and downs with staffing, ranging from laying-off everyone who was on my team as we went through the great economic downturn in 2007-2008, to numerous rounds of interviewing and hiring contractors, full-time employees, and converting some contractors to employee status. Read more →

Broken Views

“SELECT *” isn’t just hazardous to performance, it can actually return blatantly wrong information. There are a number of blog posts and articles out there that actively discourage the use of the SELECT * FROM …syntax. Read more →

SQL Server Developer Tools &ndash; Codename Juneau vs. Red-Gate SQL Source Control

So how do the new SQL Server Developer Tools (previously code-named Juneau) stack up against SQL Source Control? Read on to find out. At the PASS Community Summit a couple of weeks ago, it was announced that the previously code-named Juneau software would be released under the name of SQL Server Developer Tools with the release of SQL Server 2012. Read more →

SQL Source Control with Vault Support Officially Released

HOORAY! It is officially here! Today, Red-Gate officially released SQL Source Control version 2.1 with support for Vault. While we have been happily and successfully running the beta version (a.k.a. the Early Access release) of Red-Gate SQL Source Control with support for Vault for quite a while, it is good to have the official RTM (or GOLD, or PROD, or whatever you call your “no-longer-in-beta”) release of the product. Read more →

ASP.NET Multi-Select Radio Buttons

“HERESY!” you say, “Radio buttons are for single-select items! If you want multi-select, use checkboxes!” Well, I would agree, and that is why I consider this a significant bug that ASP. Read more →

Tools of the Trade

I got pretty excited a couple of days ago when my new laptop arrived. “The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here! I’m a somebody!” - Steve Martin in The Jerk Read more →