Explorations in Code

This section was taken from Robert L Read's How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary ( direct link to the specific section .) How to Stay Motivated It is a wonderful and surprising fact that programmers are highly motivated by the desire to create artifacts that are beautiful, useful, or nifty. This desire is not unique to programmers nor universal but it is so strong and common among programmers that it separates them from others in other roles This has practical and important consequences. If programmers are asked to do something that is not beautiful, useful, or nifty, they will have low morale. There's a lot of money to be made doing ugly, stupid, and boring stuff; but in the end, fun will make the most money for the company Obviously, there are entire industries organized around motivational techniques some of which apply here. The things that are specific to programming that I can identify are: Use the best langu...

Have you ever wanted to get an IEnumerable of files and directories and had to either make do with or convert from an Array because the System.IO namespace didn't provide methods of doing this? In .NET 4 you can do this quickly and efficiently. Check out the MSDN documentation here .

Do you need to know the sizes for all the user tables in your database? I found this script by Mitchel Sellers, an SQL Server MVP ,  to be very handy. I've modified it slightly, but you can get the original on his blog . Thank you Mitchel for allowing me to post this here. Please excuse the poor formatting, I am working on finding and implementing a decent code formatted for both SQL and C#. SET ANSI_NULLS ON GO SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO -- ============================================= -- Author:            Mitchel Sellers - mitchel.sellers@gmail.com -- Create date: 2007/06/27 -- Description: Obtains spaced used data for --                            ALL user tables in the database. --            ...

Here's a stored procedure to generate a string of random characters. This is useful when, for example, one needs to generate a random password. Please excuse the poor formatting, I am working on finding and implementing a decent code formatted for both SQL and C#. Thanks to  Raymond Lewallen  over at CodeBetter.com SET ANSI_NULLS ON GO SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO -- ============================================= -- Author:            Raymond Lewallen --                    http://codebetter.com/blogs/raymond.lewallen/archive/2005/05/17/63281.aspx -- Create date: 2005/05/16 -- Description: Generate a random string of --                            given length. --...