One of the fundamental differences between an Excel spreadsheet and a Microsoft Access or SQL Server database is the database’s ability to group data by subject into tables and create links between that information.  This type of organization enables the user to store large amounts of data and retrieve...

This is my latest Ice Breaker speech that I delivered to the Early Bird Ocala Toastmasters group on November 3, 2018.  Toastmasters is a great way to develop your public speaking and leadership skills and there’s probably at least one group in your local area.  Check out ToastMasters.org for...

One of the interesting features of C# is the ability to add custom user controls to your forms. If you have some specific functionality centered around a group of form controls that you use repeatedly, you can save it as a custom control in a class library and then...

Why Use JavaScript? There are a few technologies that you must be comfortable with if you want to do any serious web development. HTML for content, CSS for formatting and JavaScript for dynamic programming are recognized as the three foundation skills that any good web designer needs. ASP.NET programmers...

Summer vacation has mercifully arrived for me and my students.  Unlike many teachers, I’m at the school through most of the Summer.  My students get three weeks off – I get one week followed by a couple weeks of what will essentially be teacher workdays.  Judging from the sympathetic...

The following is the text from my speech to the Ocala Early Bird Toastmasters on May 19, 2018.   My name is Andrew Comeau and I am … a public school teacher? I say it that way because It’s been a study in irony for me. If you told me...

The Challenge My latest challenge to my database programming students was to create a C# class that would perform various number conversions, starting with Arabic numbers (0 to 3999) to Roman numerals and vice versa. I required that all public functions in the class needed to be declared as...

I started my (more or less) serious database development training many years ago in Microsoft Access.  One of my favorite controls was the Combo Box, a nice little drop-down field that enabled the user to select one of many values but collapsed down onto a single line.  The Combo...

The .NET framework has a few different automated methods for managing connections to SQL Server and other databases. The framework has been around since 2003 and various versions have introduced new, improved data management tools while maintaining the old ones for backward compatibility. It’s still possible, however to retrieve...

For the past six months, I’ve been teaching night classes in database programming and my students are just about ready to take Microsoft’s 98-364 exam. Now, we’re transitioning over to C# programming for the next phase of the program but I have to keep their SQL skills fresh for the...