If you have an interesting story and did not submit yet, please submit it ASAP because we will only wait until Friday afternoon.

How often you have a chance to put your hands on such nice prizes? Let me share a little secret, your odds are good, we have received less than 10 submissions so far.

We are working on SQL 2008 for a new project with the intent to leverage the new data types, in this case especially the HIERARCHYID data type. One of the stored procedures we created had a parameter of type HIERARCHYID.

The code that calls the stored procedure was something like this.

SqlHierarchyId nodeValue = GetNodeValueFromSomewhere();
var cmd =new SqlCommand("usp_EnableNode");
cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;
var  nodeParam = myCommand.Parameters.Add("@Node", SqlDbType.SqlHierarchyId);
nodeParam.Value = nodeValue; 
var enableParam = myCommand.Parameters.Add("@Enable",  SqlDbType.SqlBit);
enableParam.Value = true;
cmd.ExecuteNonQuery();

When running this code we were getting the error "UdtTypeName property must be set for UDT parameters." Since the HIERARCHYID data type is a .NET type in SQL 2008 and we had not played with .NET types in SQL 2005 yet, we scratched our heads for a few minutes.

We tried both:

nodeParam.UdtTypeName = typeof(SqlHierarchyId).Name; 

And

nodeParam.UdtTypeName = typeof(SqlHierarchyId).FullName; 

But the solution was much simpler:

nodeParam.UdtTypeName = "HierarchyId";

This should be needed for the new GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY data types as well. Maybe this helps someone else.

One thing I realized when working in large companies is that Excel is the true data exchange file format. That what the business types exchange among themselves and how they like to persist any kind of lists or anything that needs to be formatted like a table (be it tabular data or not.)

All too often one of this documents is forwarded to me containing some form of business data that will become all sorts of things: lookup data, configuration values, updates to an existing table, etc.

I dread these conversion tasks when I have to do them manually so I tend to automate the task as soon as it smells like a candidate for recurrence. That way I'll take a hit on the first time and reap the benefits from then on.

For some reason I like writing these automation scripts in Ruby. I could probably almost as easily write them in VBScript, C#, PowerShell or even VBA but my experience with Ruby is that it tends to be shorter (as in more concise) and easier to develop. Of course that varies with your level of familiarity with the Ruby libraries, but the learning curve isn't bad at all.

Consider the following hypothetical layout for an Excel file dropped in your inbox for import.

	Description	Price	Category
1	DVD Player	76.49	Electronics
2	Rain Coat	35.10	Men's apparel
3	Code Complete	49.99	Books
...	...	...	...
120	24" Monitor	499.99	Computer Accessories

My typical script to process such file would be the obvious line-by-line read, maybe processing each cell before ultimately converting the row to its final format (or skipping that row.) The skeleton of that kind of script is shown below.

require 'win32ole'

begin 
  excel_app = WIN32OLE.new('Excel.Application')
  book = excel_app.Workbooks.Open("c:\\project\\data\\datafile.xls")
  sheet = book.Worksheets(1)
  #first row contains only the headers
  row = 2 #start at the 2nd line (excel is 1-based)

  #stop when we find an empty row
  while sheet.Cells(row, 1).Value
    data = []
    (1..4).each {|c| data[c] = sheet.Cells(row, c).Value }
    #at this point the 'data' array contains the entire row
    #use it as desired *********
    
    row += 1
  end
  
rescue 
  #oops...
  puts "There was an error: #{$!}"
ensure
  #cleanup
  excel_app.DisplayAlerts = 0
  book.Close if book
  excel_app.Quit
end

But, no matter if you use Ruby or any other language, the value in automating these tasks can be tremendous. Taking the time to learn the basics of Excel automation is, in my opinion, very important and will let your users continue to use the tool that they like.

In a kind of reverse example, I have had occasions when one of the business users was repeatedly requesting for some of the data in Excel format during the application development (while we didn't have a web page to show that data yet) so, after he asked for a updated report for the second time, I created a script to read the data from the database, create an Excel file, and send the file attached in an email message every Monday morning. Easy way to gain a happy user.

Update: As noted in the comments, one nice reference for automating with Ruby is Ruby on Windows

Because there's more than one kind of hero

Update: The contest is now closed. We cannot accept any more entries. Wait for the winner announcement is a few days. Thanks for all the great submissions.

Here's your chance to win a well-deserved prize for being a good developer — and not just any prize. Devlicio.us, with the generous support from Microsoft (via Somasegar) and Addison-Wesley, is proud to present you with a contest that will dump a truckload of goodness at your doorstep. This ultimate prize package contains the following items.

1. Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#: Uncle Bob's must-have work. This book needs to be part of your Agile and OOD bookshelf.
2. Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software: Eric Evans describes DDD and how your software design can benefit from it.
3. Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns: Armed with the DDD knowlegde, now it's time to let Jimmy Nilsson show us how to implement solid .NET code.
4. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture: In this classic, Martin Fowler lays down the law on how an enterprise application needs to be designed.
5. Working Effectively with Legacy Code: We've all been there. It's hard and Michael Feathers does a great job in guiding us through the challenges and techniques to get you out of the quicksand.
6. Implementing Lean Software Development: This book by Tom and Mary Poppendieck distills practices to optimize the development process.
7. The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master: No list of this caliber would be complete without Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas' ultimate guide to developer proficiency.
8. Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite + MSDN Premium: No need for explanations here. A $10K+ retail value item with all you'll ever need in terms of Microsoft technology.

The Contest

I hope the prizes got you excited. I actually envy you because I cannot participate. The contest is pretty simple.

1. We are looking for success stories. Submit a true story that happened to you or your team where adopting good software development practices rescued a project or even the entire organization. The stories we want to award are the ones that demonstrate a direct relation between good practices or good design (or both) and successful solutions. Examples:
   • Continuous Integration saved my job.
   • DDD made my application survive the test of time.
   • My team went from grumpy to engaged after we introduced collective design ownership.
   • etc...
2. Submit your stories by email or using the Contact link to any of the Devlicio.us bloggers between today (June 5th 2008) and ~2 weeks from today (June 20th 2008 by 5 PM ET GMT-4:00).
3. The winner will be chosen by voting among the Devlicio.us bloggers. This might take up to 1 week.
4. The winner story will be announced on Devlicio.us on or before June 20th and it will become a guest blog post on the blog to which it was submitted (so remember to protect the innocent in your story.)
5. Shortly after that, the winner will be contacted for mailing address information and the prize will be shipped.
6. Other stories might be selected to feature as blog posts as well - with or without any prizes.

Restrictions

The stories need to be of your own personal experience, within your team or your organization. Since the story has a chance of being posted in Devlicio.us, make sure the people and organizations mentioned in the story are OK with that or replace their names.

We think we can ship the prize anywhere but if you're not in the U.S. and there's some form of export or import regulation that prohibits the shipment of software or even the books, then we may not be able to send it to you.

Get to the writing already

We are anxious to hear your stories. Prizes like these don't come by often and we really want to reward someone for doing the right thing.