T-SQL vs PL-SQL

"Oracle PL-SQL is the same as Microsoft T-SQL. If you know one, you know the other"

Not really.

Here are a few differences, some of them can have a serious impact of the way you write sproc code.

Good:

• T-SQL: stored procedures return result sets very easily: all you have to do is write a select statement without any 'INTO'. PL-SQL: you have to select into a ref cursor and define this ref cursor as output parameter.

Bad:

• T-SQL: stored procedures do not rollback automatically if something fails. Until SQL Server 2005 you had to test @@ERROR after each and every statement and goto a handler to rollback. Ugly, tedious and error-prone. In 2005 you can use a TRY CATCH, which is much more elegant. However you still have to rollback explicitly
  PL-SQL: sprocs are atomic. Any error inside a sproc rolls everything back up to the point where the sproc was called.
• T-SQL: no %TYPE! You can't refer to the type of a column without repeating it.
• T-SQL: RAISERROR does not break the flow. It simply returns an error string or message but the sproc still returns normally. Unless you use it within a TRY block, in which case the flow is diverted to the CATCH block (for SQL 2005 and beyond). Depending on the severity level you specify, RAISERROR within a TRY block either
• returns an error number without breaking the flow
• jumps to the CATCH block
• breaks the current database connection (wow!) (provided you have sysadmin role)
• PL-SQL: raise_application_error throws an exception, exits the current sproc, rolls back till implicit savepoint at the beginning of the sproc...

Other differences:

• Oracle does not have a BOOLEAN column type, although you can define a BOOLEAN variable in PL/SQL. SQL Server has a BIT column type where values can be only 0 or 1.
  

Using NUnit with C++ - Part 2

Follow up from part 1 We've been experimenting at work with writing unit-tests against native code for 2 months now. We're using NUnit together with CruiseControl and it works fine.

• the test project is a C++/CLI DLL compiled with /CLR option.
• the project containing the code under test has an additional project configuration that generates a static LIB instead of an executable.
• the test project links to the native LIB above.

What if the code under test is C++ compiled with /CLR? For some reason I thought it wasn't possible to create a static LIB when the /CLR option was active. C++/CLI is very flexible and you can generate a static library containing a mix of managed and unmanaged code. The purpose of building a mixed static lib is to easily import native code into a test project. We keep the test project and the code under test in separate solutions.

Get time in HH:mm format regardless of the local culture

DateTime.Now.ToShortTimeString() returns a string that depends on the culture. DateTime.Now.ToString("HH:mm") is deterministic. Use DateTime.Now.ToUniversalTime.ToString("HH:mm") to get the current HH:mm time in UTC.