In my previous post, I talked about how I’d decided to try the TracFone prepaid phone now that I’m nearing the end of my 2-year contract on my HTC EVO.  I just wanted to follow up with a couple of minor points: When you buy a phone pay attention...

A couple of years ago, I was dazzled by the new HTC EVO 4G smartphone that a supervisor had gotten himself.  I was about ready to change out phones, anyway and when I saw all the things the Android phone could do that my old phone couldn’t, I was...

While preparing for a recent interview with a local company, I was going through my list of questions to ask the interviewer and suddenly realized it would make a good article for the site: Surviving the Programming Interview: Responding to “Do you have any questions for us?” Although this...

I’ve been re-reading Robert A. Heinlein’s Expanded Universe, a collection of his short stories and articles from throughout his writing career. I first read this book as a teenager and skimmed over some of the parts that just didn’t hold my attention at the time but, as I’ve found...

So I was playing around with the blog’s theme after recommending WordPress to someone and thought “Gee, it would be nice if I actually wrote something here.  It’s only been since April.”. So here are a few notes on my latest projects … A couple months ago, I started...

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....

(Previously published on AndrewComeau.com.) Introduction Programming and software development is a type of engineering. More than just sitting down and typing code, it’s about designing solutions to everyday problems using technical knowledge gained over years of training and experience. Larger projects can include a series of challenges to solve, some of which can’t...

I’d planned to spend the weekend writing up a new programming article for the site but it got a little hi-jacked by another project I was working on. On Friday, I needed to figure out how to generate ZIP files from a website and just couldn’t put it down...

I’ve started to see some sales of the eBook version of “Microsoft Access for Beginners” and was happy to hear from one of the readers today, despite the fact that he was reporting a problem … It seems there was an issue with the Access 2007 / 2010 version...