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Some "Laws" of Software Development

Despite all the advances in software tools, there seem to be several enduring truths about software development. By understaning these 'laws', Ziv’s law, Humphrey’s Law and Conway’s Law for example, you can remove some of the mystery of the process. Al Noel discusses these and other laws that seem to apply generally to the art of programming.

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Why is your ASP.NET application running slow?

Any queries run against SQL Server or Oracle databases are recorded, along with how many times those queries were run and how long they took. That information is shown alongside your .NET code, so you can quickly see why the code you wrote resulted in those queries being executed. This can be particularly powerful if you’re using ORMs like Entity Framework to access data, which tend to be an impenetrable black box where performance issues can arise, but where it’s difficult to understand why.

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Question of the Day

ORDER BY alias

There is a table tmp_tab: 

CREATE TABLE tmp_tab (
id int,
val int
);
INSERT INTO tmp_tab VALUES
(1, 1),
(2, NULL),
(3, 3),
(4, 4),
(5, 5);
You want to order the rows ids by the following expression: 
    ISNULL(val, id) + 1
Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct)

See possible answers