Simon Hughes - Software Architect, Tutor, Developer

Download this free encoder: http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html The download link is very hard to find, so its here Use these settings: Output container: AVI Video Codec: DIVX Audio Codec: mp3 Encoder: MEncoder Video settings Size: 320:176 Aspect: 16:9 Frame/sec: 12.5 (pal) 14.985 (NTSC) Audio settings Sampling freq: 22050 Channels: 2 Bitrate: 64 Audio stream: default Enjoy!

Here is the critique and why there is a better solution to the article: A generic singleton Well, it isn't really singleton - since you can't control T , there can be as many T instances as you like. The code does check for non-public constructors, which is good. However, this is a check which is only performed at execution time - there's no compile-time check, which is a strike against it. It also relies on having enough access to call the non-public constructor, which adds some limitations. In addition, it doesn't prohibit internal constructors - so you can end up with non-singletons. There is an excellent article on singletons at http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/singleton.html Here are two proper implementations: public sealed class Singleton { static readonly Singleton instance = new Singleton(); // Explicit static constructor to tell C# compiler // not to mark type as beforefieldinit static Singleton() { } Si...

Part 1 is availble below More generally speaking, you should never use a function on the LEFT side of a WHERE clause in a query. If you do, SQL won't use an index--it has to evaluate the function for every row of the table. The goal is to make sure that your where clause is " Sargable " Some other examples: Bad: Select ... WHERE isNull (FullName, '' ) = 'Ed Jones' Fixed: Select ... WHERE ((FullName = 'Ed Jones' ) OR (FullName IS NULL )) Bad: Select ... WHERE SUBSTRING (DealerName, 4 ) = 'Ford' Fixed: Select ... WHERE DealerName Like 'Ford%' Bad: Select ... WHERE DateDiff (mm,OrderDate, GetDate ()) >= 30 Fixed: Select ... WHERE OrderDate DateAdd (mm,- 30 , GetDate ()) Bad: Select ... WHERE Year (OrderDate) = 2003 Fixed: Select ... WHERE OrderDate >= '2003-1-1' AND OrderDate '2004-1-1'