DevelopMENTAL Madness

Monday, January 22, 2007

Using a Vista Sidebar Gadget to Consume an Image Feed

CodeProject.com has several Windows Vista coding competitions running at the moment so I thought I'd throw my hat in and give the Gadgets competition a try. Mostly because they promised a Zune to the top 5 January articles and I didn't want to wait 3 months to win a prize. So I dug in and wrote an article on publishing photo galleries to a Vista Gadget client. The gadget actually allows the user to login to the public website and purchase photos they like.

http://www.codeproject.com/gadgets/SidebarImageFeed.asp



The process was pretty interesting, I enjoyed making the gadget and learning the technology - I don't think I'll be creating many more of these though. But it kind of wet my appetite for Vista. Maybe I'll throw my hat in for the other competition on the Vista API.

Labels: ,

Friday, January 12, 2007

Use SQL Parameters to Overcome Ad Hoc Performance Issues

As I look around the net at different articles and tutorials I'm surprised at how many use Dynamic SQL for samples. Even after the many warnings about SQL injection attacks. But there are other issues besides security. One of which is performance - dynamic SQL performs very poorly when not used properly. So I decided to write an article pointing out how poorly dynamic SQL can be if improperly used. I hope it will convince some to change how they write their client SQL code. Here's the link:

http://www.codeproject.com/cs/database/ParameterizingAdHocSQL.asp



I might even write another article that expands on this idea to put down the misconception that as long as stored procedures are used that the database is free from SQL injection vulnerabilities.

Labels: , , ,