C#, MySQL, and Inteview Fun

This was a crazy week. Two job interviews and tech projects kept me going quite a bit. Here's the story.

Reacquainting with .NET.

Since one of the jobs was for C# and ASP.NET, a refresh was in order. The first C# program took half an hour and covered features taught in an Intro to programming course. The ease of refresh was thanks to the fact that Python and Java has many of the same features C# has.

ASP.NET required setting up an XSP development server and writing some quick “code behind”. It was like writing VB form code but with C#. That much was easy. Figuring out how to deploy was harder. Getting C# talking to MySQL was hardest of all.  Finishing that one can wait.

End of the MySQL Stored Procedure Experiment

Speaking of MySQL, the stored procedure experiment came to a successful conclusion. I buried both SQL code and logic that was in PHP in the database. While burying a single query in a stored procedure offers no performance gains, there are other benefits for the Uncle Squirrelly project. The PHP code is cleaner and the overall application is more secure. Despite these gains, However, I still have no intentions of merging that git branch. If it ever went back in production, MySQL permissions for stored procedures could become an issue.

Better CSS Menus

Studying the source of other web sites brought to my attention a better way of handling menus in Blender Python Tutorials. Combining unordered lists and CSS makes for a nicer menu setup with consistent control of margins and padding. Another site had a CSS text rollover effect that also got implemented.

So that was my week. It was job interviews and tech work and I had fun. I look forward to more interesting things in the coming week.