Patterns & Practices

The Microsoft Patterns and Practices (P&P) website is a veritable gold mine of information on architecting and developing .Net based applications among other things. Check out these P&P guides ...

Its Events sections features live, recently recorded and archived webcasts on various facets of web development using Microsoft technologies.


Popular posts from this blog

HOW TO add a header or footer to a dynamically generated Word document

Image
There was a question recently on my CodeProject article "Dynamically generate a MS Word document using HTML & CSS" . The article describes how to generate a Word document programmatically without using any components, by exploiting the formatting features exposed through Office XML and CSS. The questioner wanted to know how to add a custom header and footer and show something like Page X of Y (total pages). Based on what I have tried so far, showing a header and footer using Office XML in MS Word is not as easy as it is in Excel . If you want to keep the code simple & don't need any great fireworks i.e. you will just settle for page numbers in the header or footer then it's a matter of adding a few lines to the original source code. The code can be viewed at this Github Gist Update (1-Sep-2010): To add a custom header & footer, check this new post To add a footer that shows Page number at the bottom right, here are the steps - 1) Add these classes...
Read more

HOW TO Filter Products on Open Food Facts by Country (India) Using DuckDB & Superset

Image
Open Food Facts (OFF) is a crowd-sourced database of food products from around the world.  Somewhere in the world, a shopper scans the barcode on a packet of biscuits and adds basic product details. Another person photographs a package label for the same product in Hyderabad. A volunteer in France fixes a typo.  That's Open Food Facts, a volunteer-built, openly licensed database of food products that's continually changing and growing. Each product is identified by a barcode and carries ingredients, nutrition facts, brands, labels and more. The whole database has millions of products, and let's say you only want the products recorded as being sold or available in one country like India. There are multiple ways to extract a subset of the OFF database. I have already tried using the daily dump available on Hugging Face through Google Colab and GitHub Actions in the past but it blew my mind that using the OFF deployed Apache Superset , you can execute a SQL query in a brows...
Read more

Oracle University Free Courses & Certification Exam Prep Material (2026)

Image
A few decades ago, quality training was scarce and costly. Thanks to the convergence of several new advancements, software vendors now provide online training to a worldwide audience, making skill acquisition more accessible than ever. Microsoft offers its Microsoft Learn platform, Google provides Google Skills , and Oracle University is doing a great job of delivering training for their products while also covering higher-level concepts relevant to the database, cloud, and AI domains. The following Oracle certification exams are free to take and come with learning resources: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Foundations Associate (1Z0-1085-26) Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate (1Z0-1072-26)   Oracle Data Center Operations Foundations Associate (1Z0-3000) Oracle Multicloud Foundations Associate (1Z0-1144-26) Oracle Cloud Infrastructure AI Foundations Associate (1Z0-1122-26) Oracle AI Database Foundations Associate (1Z0-1195-26) Additionally, Oracle University offers many ...
Read more