Hello there and welcome to my home page!

My name is Ladislau (Ladi) Molnar. I am a professional software developer living in the Seattle area. I started coding quite a while ago and to get an idea, one of the first devices I used had 64 bytes of memory and was programmed by inserting metallic pins into some holes. Around the same time I started using FORTRAN and COBOL and quickly moved to machine language for Z-80 and I8080. After a few years I moved to C and C++. About 8 years ago I switched again this time to C# and .NET. Since then I programmed mostly in C#, JavaScript, T-SQL and got a fair amount of experience in technologies and platforms like .NET, SQL Server, OLAP, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, Web services, XML. The most recent technology I started playing with is Silverlight and I must say I am pretty much in love with the thing.

I worked at companies that range from the very small to the very large and on occasion I freelanced and sold my own product. During all this time I worked on some really exciting projects. You can find a list of those projects here.

Various side projects that I wrote and that are available online.

A Silverlight application that can be used to explore the Mandelbrot and Julia sets. I started to work on it as a way to learn Silverlight but after a few weeks since fractals are so cool it took a life of its own. It never ceased to amaze me how quite simple mathematical functions can have a graphical representation like the ones you see below.

T.S.T. is a tool that simplifies writing and running automated tests for code written in T-SQL. It provides an API that is similar with those found in Unit Testing libraries familiar to programmers in C# or Java. This API is isolated in a dedicated database that is installed when the tool is setup. The installation takes just a few seconds and the learning curve for someone already familiar with SQL programming is minimal.

The T.S.T. tool is an open source project. Downloads and documentation are available on the Codeplex web site.

JavaScript Tools is a collection of utilities written in JavaScript. Things like "XSLT Try It" or a "JavaScript Object Inspector".

An article on how to customize and inherit your own classes from ItemsControl. When developing in Silverlight there are a lot of scenarios where the default behavior of an ItemsControl or a ListBox will not suffice. Documentation about how to do customizations in those cases is hard to come by so I decided to make available all the information I collected on the subject. The article also discusses about virtualization in ItemsControl and how can that be implemented in custom classes inherited from ItemsControl.

The examples discussed in this article are illustrated in a sample Silverlight application you can view at http://www.ladimolnar.com/Projects/ItemsControlDemo You can download the code from http://www.ladimolnar.com/Sources/ItemsControlDemo.zip.

An article about automating tests for T-SQL code and using the T.S.T. tool. Published on SqlServerCentral on June 30th 2009.

Even if you are only a casual SQL developer you probably know that the presence or the absence of indexes can dramatically impact the performance of certain queries. A query that filters data from a huge table will execute a lot faster if that table has just the right indexes.

There is also a different aspect of indexes that has to do with scenarios in which different clients concurrently modify data in the same tables. Without indexes, concurrent clients that use transactions will not only perform more expensive operations but they also may end up locking each other even though they need access to completely separate areas of the same table.

This article can help you better understand how indexes can impact concurrent access to data.

Links that for various reasons caught my eye.

A few books that I found to be well written as well as interesting.