Category Archive: Programming

Adventures in software development

Sep 19

.Net Collection Types: Hashtable vs. Dictionary

Deciding what type of collection to use in a project is based on the objectives and needs of your project – which you will probably already know.  But to decide which collection object to use, you need to know the major and subtle differences in collection implementations and what their impact will be on your …

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Aug 19

Using Generics in .Net

Generics provide for extended code reusability and type safety in your projects.  A generic is a class, structure or interface that uses a type parameter as a placeholder for the actual type that it will contain or use.  These generic type definitions cannot be instantiated as they are not complete. In its simplest form, it …

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Jul 19

Data Adapters in ADO.Net

Data Adapters are the objects in ADO.Net that allow us to communicate and exchange data between a data source and a dataset.  With them, we are able to retrieve data from and write data to a database (actually any type of data repository). The type of database you are connecting to informs you as to …

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Jul 12

C# .Net Basics: Classes

Classes A class is a user defined object or type construct that allows you to group together fields, properties and methods into a custom type that behaves in a consistent way.  A class is a reference type; when an instance of a class is instantiated, an object reference is returned to the calling function, not …

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Aug 08

Amazon FPS Library for VB.Net

Amazon released a C# Demo for FPS, but not a VB.Net one. Since VB.Net is my preferred language, I converted the C# library to VB.Net. It would seem that Amazon will probably continually release new versions of the WSDL in C# – to avoid having to convert it every time and to make future upgrades …

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Aug 05

The Amazon FPS API – not your simple widget

I’ve spent a lot of time this weekend digging through the API for the new Amazon Flexible Payment System (FPS). This is not just a quick whiz-bang API that you spend 20 minutes with and have something cool up and running! Just getting set-up to communicate with FPS is a somewhat time consuming learning curve. …

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Aug 03

Amazon Announces “Flexible Payment Service” or FPS

With what may have been the biggest buildup to a blog post I’ve ever seen (all done via Twitter), Jeff Barr publicly announced Amazon’s FPS product – effectively ending my NDA about it from over a year ago. FPS is a micro-payment system that shields the parties involved in the transaction from having to deal …

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Dec 13

Social Fiefdoms

I don’t know if I’ve coined the term ‘Social Fiefdom’ or not, but I thought of it the other day and I think it does a great job of describing the social respect meme that we humans naturally create and follow. I’ve heard several people discussing parts of this phenomena and I wanted to start …

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