I want to say again that decision to make identifiers case-insensitive is one of the worst design decisions a language author can make. Along with that goes “declare on first usage” decision, but more on this later.

Why is it bad? Because you either have to have proper development tools that support this decision, or assume high professionalism of the developers, letting them use conventional tools. Good professional developer will be consistent with casing of identifiers, because he sticks to some naming convention and case means something there (this is wild assumption, but I believe it is true, hehe). (more…)

Virtually in every project you have to do some UI mockups. I mean, if you have some methodology, you are a team and you are serious about your project.

In my past experience I have tried different ways of creating mockups:

1. hand-drawn pictures;
2. hand-drawn pictures, photographed with digital camera and inserted into requirement doc;
3. Visio documents (duh!);
4. some actual code.

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Today I had to fight one small, but highly annoying problem. It is related to Entity Framework and SQL Server connection string. When you create a .edmx file with your model, the wizard automatically inserts proper connection string to your app.config or web.config file. Well, it is not always correct string.

In my case, I have .edmx file in a class library and it worked fine when I was using it from WinForms application. But then I decided to put it on a web site. And it ceased to work. The only thing I could get from it was

SQL Server 2005 SQLExpress error: …provider: Named Pipes Provider, error 40 – Could not open connection to SQL Server

I tried many things, but in the end it turned to be some mistreatment of a connection string. Mine looks this way:

The problem goes away when I put a backslash instead of slash in “./SQLEXPRESS”. It looks pretty weird, because they always used forward slash in such autogenerated connection strings, didn’t they?

P.S.: Sorry about connection string being image here.