Julie Lerman's DevLife

DevLife Part I [May 2005 - March 2007]

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A blog for DevSource.com.

This blog was originally part of the blogs.ziffdavis.com site from May 2005 through June 2007 when the blog was moved to the Movable Type blog engine and hosted at blog.devsource.com/devlife.
The original blog was eventually shut down and I was given the posts so that I could host them on my own site.


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Little Discoveries in your daily tools

One of the great difficulties of programming is having to accept the fact that we can't know every little function and feature that exist in our development tools. In the old days it was easy to write an application from end to end, understand all that was available to you in your IDE and database and even fix your parent's computer if they had problems. But now there is just too much and we either specialize, team up with others or just do the best we can  -- which often also requires spending many many many extra hours trying to learn and explore in addition to actually just getting our work done.

That is just a preface to the fact that out of need, I discovered the IsDate() function in T-SQL this morning which really solved a big problem for me. I have a routine where I need to select DateTime data from a table that allows flexibility in times (eg "12ish") and insert it into a table that requires proper DateTime data. Therefore "7am" was okay, but “7-9am” needs to end up as a NULL and be entered manually by the end user in their application.

I was embarrassed that I didn't realize, after so many years of working with SQL Server, that such a useful little function existed. So I was able to shore up my ego a little bit by reminding myself that I can't know *everything*!

posted on Thursday, June 23, 2005 3:32 PM