Programming

When writing programs, it’s often necessary to perform repeating operations on collections of items such as customer orders or invoices.  Often, you can just iterate through the collection or count the items to determine how many times to perform the operation.  When working with a hierarchy of items such as...

(This article was updated in August 2018 for use with Visual Studio 2017.) Moving Beyond Microsoft Access I’ve written a lot about Microsoft Access over the years and still believe it’s a great training ground for people who want to learn to design database applications. Its user-friendly interface provides...

In the last chapter, I talked about some of the current options when it comes to getting started in the programming field. I mentioned several development tools that you can get familiar with to decide what path you want to take as a software developer but getting started is...

So far, I’ve given you some general ideas of what it takes to start and maintain a career in software development but you’re probably still wanting some direction as to the actual first steps of learning how to program. In this chapter, I’ll give you a sampling of the...

You’ve probably heard people talk about how we’re living in the Information Age with an emphasis on how much information there is to process from all different directions. This is certainly true and it can be a challenge for the average person, especially if they were born even a...

Ask a lot of people about the requirements to be a computer programmer or software developer and they’ll probably start talking about computer science degrees and years of formal training. Those things don’t hurt but they’re not strictly necessary, either. I personally do not have a degree aside from the...

In my upcoming book, Your First Guide to Database Design, my goal is to provide a clear guide for users at all  levels of experience on how to organize their data into an efficient database, regardless of whether they’re using a desktop database like Microsoft Access or a network software...

Efficiency is one of the overriding considerations when designing almost any kind of application. This requirement affects everything from the algorithms used to the distribution of work within the system....

If you’ve worked with Visual Studio or .NET for long, you’re probably familiar with the System.Data.DataSet class which enables you to create a collection of data in memory, often retrieved from an SQL database. Within a dataset object, you can have a series of related DataTables that categorize the data....