Ever since humanity first arrived on the scene one of the ways we've communicated with each other was through visual symbols. Written language itself evolved from the pictorial symbols created by the Sumerians to conduct business! (Now that's too long of a story to write now, but you can read about it here if you like.) Even as books arrived on the scene, the creators would add value to their labor's internal messages by illuminating the pages with drawings of the written content to reach as many people as possible. Adding pictures to the books sold more books. Adding icons to an application or website increases reader (and customer) involvement.

It is a well-known truth in technical circles - most successful "hacks" have as much to do with fooling users into opening a door as they do forcing their way in through that door. There is another case of that type of problem going around, this time involving Facebook.

Recently, you may have read about the Google hack that happened in China. If not, the thing you need to know now is that the malicious code used in that hack is now freely available on the internet. That means unethical users can use this code in new and creative ways, potentially against you. The code targets Internet Explorer 6 running on Windows XP.

Prior to SQL Server 2005, you only had a few labor-intensive options if you wanted to order to pass a collection of values to a stored procedure from your .NET application.

If your data was an array of objects containing only single values, such as an array of strings, you could pass a delimited string to the stored procedure. Inside your procedure you would have to then parse the string and fill a temporary table with each piece of data.

Next Saturday, September 26th, the University of Houston will be hosting the Houston TechFest. The events provides a whole day of training session for programmers for a wide range of technologies including .net, iPhone, Java, Ruby, and more. And the best part is that it's all FREE!

As part of Microsoft's online training seminar, Virtual Tech Days, they have a vast amount of training videos available online. One in particular that caught my attention was Top 5 Web Application Security bugs in custom code. Click the link below to see it.

It is becoming fairly typical for a developer’s workstation to have dual monitors. For me, my main code editor is usually on my primary monitor, and other resources such as e-mail, database tools, or reference web pages are moved to my second monitor.

If the Mono project can gain enough support, it could be releasing a new framework and compiler that will allow .net developers to write iPhone applications in C# using Apple's native code library and SDK.

Because you can't teach an old dog new tricks, it's about time we grab the shotgun, take Internet Explorer 6 out back and send it to a better place (the Recycle Bin).

Google is aiming for Microsoft yet again with a new, free communication and collaboration and tool on the web called Google Wave.  Google Wave seeks to provide the same functionality as SharePoint but in a more easily extended and interactive interface.

As much as Apple, Google, or a variety of “Face-Spaces” hate to admit it, when Microsoft speaks about the future the I.T. world listens. Despite having more fierce competition in the last five years than they’ve ever had, Microsoft’s dominant market share is still undeniable. In college I asked my networking instructor why TCP/IP was the standard protocol even though it was so flawed in terms of security. He responded “because that’s what Microsoft chose.” In many ways, especially in the business world, they still have that kind of power.