Links for the Week of 2009.05.15

SQL SERVER

Find Last Date Time Updated for Any Table Ever want to know when a table was last updated? Now you can find out. Thanks to Pinal Dave for this slick little piece of code, I was totally astounded to know that you could do that. Why use stored procedures? A very well reasoned argument for the use of stored procedures from Paul Nielsen.

DEVELOPMENT

More ASP.NET MVC Best Practices Working with ASP.NET MVC? I know I haven’t had a chance to do much so I’ve got plenty of room to mess things up. That’s why best practices from others in the field are important to pay attention to. What’s in your svn:ignore? Anyone who has ever used subversion is well aware of the pains that come when you get preference files and DLLs in your source control repository. How do you prevent that? By mucking around with svn:ignore, of course! (This also applies to anyone using VSTSDD, by the way.) Unit tests vs Integration tests Ayende Rahien sums it up pretty well in just a sentence or two. I’ve had problems making the distinction clear to people in a succint way in the past. No longer shall I be at a loss for words!

STUFF & THINGS

6 Small Things You Can Do When You Lack Discipline So being disciplined is the key to success, right? And you’re having problems staying disciplined, so that clearly means you’re a failure, right? Wrong. None of us are 100% disciplined 100% of the time. Check out this post from Leo Babauta over at zenhabits.net for some great tips to keep yourself going. How to Learn a Little Every Day I cannot stress this enough: learning is the most important thing you can ever do. I say it all the time. When people ask me what motivates me, I always respond that my primary motivation in everything is learning. Here are some great hints from Dumb Little Man on incorporating getting your learn on into your daily schedule. burning fight Awesome live concert photos from Matt Miller. You can hire him for your less noisy events. After looking at his portfolio I would say that you probably should hire him. On Non-Disclosure Agreements Seriously, this is what you sound like. Stop it. Unless it’s for humorous purposes. In that case you can go NDA yourself.