Technology and Innovation Musings - Alenka Caserman

You know those nice little helpful add-ins and plug-ins that you discover one day and they really help with your productivity? Today I had to do some SQL scripting again and since I don't do it that often I get a little rusty. I also hate ugly looking code of any kind - anything that's not neat, tidy and sensibly formatted. Formatting is one of those things that's best automated - why would you waste your time meticulously making sure all your code is of consistent style, broken into new lines at the right point etc. Tools help and one such tool is the Poor Man's T-SQL Formatter: http://architectshack.com/PoorMansTSqlFormatter.ashx I discovered this one many years ago and I keep coming back to it because it is simply what I need, it works, it's quick to install and doesn't cost anything. Today I was working with Sql Server Management Studio 2017 and I wondered, hey does that plugin work with this version. Yes, yes it does. Awesome. Absolute kudos to th

The other day I was reviewing a request for a quote and a statement of work for a project I've been working on for a while and my eye caught an interesting statement I haven't noticed before: ...the proposed approach of refactoring the codebase and procuring COTS products for replacement of hard-coded functionality is the lowest risk and most cost-effective approach to delivering an improved solution... Hard-coded functionality? Huh? What's that? Well, technically, all functionality implemented by means of software code is hard-coded in a sense or in other words, doesn't change unless you change the code logic. That's actually perfectly normal and good thing. You wouldn't want your software to go all fuzzy and produce different results each time given the same inputs. So clearly, whoever wrote the request for a quote didn't understand what hard-coded means. The term hard-coded is used in a slightly different context and is considered a negative pract