For daily coding, it's all about personal preference.  Personally, I use a while background.  I think the normal syntax highlighting stands out better against white.  That said, I work with...

I don't know I'm doing differently than you guys, but my times are a whole lot different.

Piet Linden's point about implicit conversion is something that's pretty serious.

In a nutshell, when the engine  has to compare values (join, where or having) the data types have...

This is probably low-hanging fruit, but since it's low-hanging, you might as well take a look at it. 

In the .NET project, I presume it's calling a stored...

I see I forgot to define dbo.TallyN.  It's Itzik's zero-read tally ITVF.  I use it so much I sometimes think it's a part of SQL Server.  It isn't, but it...