I work, as do most of the people at Quercus, on a Dell Latitude D820 laptop. They are great machines and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the entire line to anyone who is looking for a good desktop replacement. It's only real drawback is that the internal HDD is a little on the small size.  We also run most of our applications in a virtual machine or through a citrix server.  And this is where it sometimes gets goofy.

Every once in a while, and for no apparent reason, the keyboard would remap itself.  The basic keys (a-z & 0-9) would remain the same, but everything else would shuffle around.  The ' key would suddenly turn into the ` key, and the " would become the ~.  The \ became an E with an accent on top, and the # would become a /.  All in all, it made it very difficult to cut code.  Even typing a basic letter was difficul ... Read More »

The client I'm working with at the moment has decided to push their security settings into the database.  By that I don't mean that they are setting up a special table for permissions or anything, they are actually using the built-in security in the database to control access to the data.  At first I wasn't convinced this was a good idea, since the more normal N-Tier methodology was to simply lock everyone except the data layer out of the database, and then let either the data layer or the business logic layer handle who could do what.

The problem with relying on the DAL or the BLL to secure the database is that Microsoft has been making it easier and easier for non-technical people to access databases.  Where you used to have to enter a long arcane connection string using a specialized program to access a SQL database, now it is as easy as 3 clicks of the mouse in Excel to conn ... Read More »

The application I've been working on for the past couple of months has a very generic UI on it. It uses a database table which configures which tables a user can see, how they see them, and what data they contain.  This is all based on the entities that are available to the system through the LLBL generated data layer. Basically anything in the DAL can be configured, and anything that is configured can be modified by the user.

The UI literally consists of 1 form and 2 web controls, which configure themselves to suit whatever entity we are working with at the time.  While this is all working fairly well at this point, some of the code that we needed was a little different.  We are using reflection in lots of places to access properties on objects because we can't tell at design time which type of object we will be working with.  LLBL defines a bunch of interface ... Read More »