Issue: 2022 - July/August

Rod talks about writing code that lasts. The applications he's writing today will likely still be used in 15-20 years, so good software architecture is key to that longevity.

Paul starts a new series about creating reusable wrappers that limit the amount of code you need to write when you’re working with ADO.NET in .NET 6.

C# 7.2 has introduced two new types: Span and Memory. If you need to work with large chunks of memory in a high performance manner, these new types provide a faster way to work with arrays and subarrays, strings and subscrings, and unmanaged memory buffers. Joydip dives in and finds that they’re incredibly useful.

Last time, Bilal looked at Models—the M in MVC. This time, he explains about Views and Controllers (the V and the C) and how to take advantage of them in PHP Laravel.

Everyone’s using JavaScript. That’s terrific, but the fact that it is weakly typed causes limitations, especially for large applications. Shawn shows you how to overcome those limitations using TypeScript. For example, TypeScript adds type safety functionality so type checking is done at compilation time.

Wei-Meng explores creating dashboards using Grafana, a great tool for creating charts and other visual presentations of your data.

Have you hoped for a good replacement for VBA for old versions of Office, but with the power of the .NET Framework and available to use with Microsoft 365? Try Accelerate's Visual Scheme for Applications (VSA), which you can use to create customer functions and more in Excel for Microsoft 365. Bob finds that the Scheme tool makes writing user-defined functions in Excel easy.

Not everyone understands the true meaning of running an agile software development team. John reviews how to keep focus on agile principles and get the most from this philosophy. Do planning, do documentation, inspect the tools you are using, and adapt to improve.