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Monthly Archives: February 2010

Technology to fit your business; not the other way around

By Pedram on February 19, 2010

Thanks to the recent advances in information technology, rich internet applications, mobile technologies, etc. businesses can now be exponentially more productive and enjoy tremendous marketing opportunities if they can identify and develop the right technology solution that best fits their…

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Internal Uniqueness Constraints

By Michael on February 18, 2010
The simplest and most commonly used constraint in ORM is the internal uniqueness constraint. This constraint basically specifies a one-to-many relationship on a role. The easiest way to show this is through an example. Let's use the following fact: The Student with ID 1 has Name 'Bob'
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ORM Basics: Entities, Values, Roles, and Facts

By Jarrod on February 17, 2010
Object-role modeling is a fantastic tool that allows one to construct incredibly rich and complex information models. Because of this, it can be difficult to identify a starting point to jump in and begin learning ORM. At ProAce, we feel that identifying the primitive building blocks and working our way up is the natural way to begin teaching any new technique. For ORM, these building blocks are the fundamental types: entities, values, roles and facts.
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Object-Role Modeling kickoff

By Josh Arnold on February 12, 2010
Our team has been having some great discussions on Object-Role Modeling this month and I really like the topics that we’ve covered. While ORM is a pivotal part of our internal process, it’s been very interesting to discuss how/when/where/why we actually use it. More importantly, discussing the pros/cons has been really enlightening to identify some of our inefficiencies and brainstorm over ways to help improve our process.
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ProAce is hiring a software developer

By Josh Arnold on February 11, 2010
We are currently looking for a well-rounded software developer that is passionate about his/her craft with C# and web development experience. Candidates should have experience working in team environments and have a firm understanding of S.O.L.I.D. principles. While not required, experience with testing and participation in the development community is a plus.
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Unique Constraints on Nullable Columns in SQL Server 2008

By Michael on February 11, 2010
In earlier versions of SQL Server when you created a unique constraint on a nullable column, NULL would count as a value and you would only be able to use NULL once. The workaround for this was to create a trigger that enforced uniqueness for only the non-null values, but that is not necessarily an ideal solution. Luckily there is a cleaner solution offered in SQL Server 2008 that is also very flexible.
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Using ImageX to rapidly deploy windows

By Michael on February 9, 2010
At ProAce we recently purchased some new development machines and needed to quickly get Windows installed with all of our development tools. For anyone that has ever set up a development machine, you know the process can be a full day's work installing various editions of Visual Studio and SQL Server. Multiply that by the number of machines and we could have easily spent a week setting up the four machines that we purchased. This is where imaging comes in handy. Imaging allows you to set up one computer and basically create a template for the rest of the machines. People familiar with corporate environments might often hear IT staff referring to re-imaging a machine, an easy way to revert a system back to a fresh status without having to reinstall all of it's base software like Office. In our experience it was a simple way to cut deployment time to a single day of work, and because the tools are free from Microsoft, the process could not have been more satisfying.
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Top 5 Web metrics that really matter

By Rob on February 9, 2010
Cash register dollars customer

Photo credit: Flickr/luzbonita / CC BY 2.0

Take a lesson from retailers in the mall--they know what the important elements are that can make or break a store's success. Shop owners intuitively look at just the few things they know mean dollars at the register. So I recommend looking at fewer, more telling measurements at first and improving only those. The rest of the success metrics to test, track and tweak will follow.
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Business domains for developers

By Josh Arnold on February 2, 2010
domain driven design information modeling
Among many of its other benefits, Domain-Driven Design has provided our team with a way of approaching software from a domain-centric approach. Domains are often complex; with so much focus on the model and logic in complex domain designs, it’s important to keep track of all of the pieces. Here at ProAce, we use a method called Object-Role-Modeling.
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