Stored procedure error handling in SQL Server 2000

Today, we’re continuing work on our multipart message aggregation upgrade for a future Esendex release. One part of the investigations this morning has been looking into how we manage the database access as we add parts of an incoming message to it for later processing. As we have multiple servers processing inbound messages, there was… Continue reading Stored procedure error handling in SQL Server 2000

Of spam and things…

It’s been a few times this last year that I’ve been the victim of a domain spam attack. Sending email appearing to be someone else isn’t a difficult thing to achieve. Yet when someone takes one of your domains and sends spam, well I was going to say on my behalf but I never asked… Continue reading Of spam and things…

Checking it out

I have a feeling that a lot of small to medium development operations will still be using Microsoft‘s Visual SourceSafe to manage their central code-base despite its limitations. Given that Microsoft have since addressed this hole in their development offerings with the excellent Team Foundation Server which offers a seamless experience within Visual Studio 2005… Continue reading Checking it out

Have you got the Bug?

Being involved in web development work, I have to have a wide range of browsers installed to make sure what I’m creating is accessible to as many people as possible. Whilst I still have a soft-spot for Opera, it is without a doubt that Firefox is the Swiss Army Knife of all browsers. The ability… Continue reading Have you got the Bug?

Credit card regular expressions

Following on from my previous post about credit card authentication with regular expressions, I thought I’d share my other discovery. The BIN Ranges list I found showed a list of Visa cards which were designated ‘ATMOnly. Figuring these would be a good thing to filter out during validation. There’s plenty of regular expression help about… Continue reading Credit card regular expressions

Maestro, music please

We’ve been working on a change request to add Maestro to the credit cards that we accept for ecommerce payments. Switch started in 1988 but has now merged with the Maestro network owned by MasterCard in the UK. Until recently, if you took Switch payments then UK customers who had new Maestro cards would still… Continue reading Maestro, music please

XP’s Command Prompt retains old environment variables settings

The following post is courtesy of the IMMWITWIGIOTSS Society to save your brain while it’s still pressing Snooze at home. Logic would dictate if you update the PATH environment variable then you’d hope the next command you uttered from the command prompt window would use this updated information. You can keep typing ‘echo %PATH%’ till… Continue reading XP’s Command Prompt retains old environment variables settings

Welcome to dev:ices

I’ve decided to give my development blog a new lease of life since the reinstall of the server. I guess the other reason I’m hopeful about continuing to blog more is the discovery of ScribeFire which plugs into Firefox and seems to make the whole process of blogging a lot easier. Not least the ability… Continue reading Welcome to dev:ices