NXT is excellent for kids. I have been coaching kids 8 years up in a world wide challenge call First Lego League or FLL. Not only does this program involve teaching building and programming robots but also teamwork and problem solving in a fun competitive environment. Especially great for kids that don't compete in sports. First Lego League

A solution to one part of the problem can be to define types in sql and then extract that information for code validation. I'd be interested in any tools to do the latter, but this is a nice way to define "constants" or types in sql. /*Define INENTIFIER as varchar(50*/ IF NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.types st JOIN sys.schemas ss ON st.schema_id = ss.schema_id WHERE st.name = N'IDENTIFIER' AND ss.name = N'dbo') CREATE TYPE dbo.IDENTIFIER from varchar(50) null /*Use the newly defined system type.*/ ALTER TABLE [dbo].[Customers] ALTER COLUMN [Id] IDENTIFIER /* varchar(50) */ You can use IDENTIFIER for your stored procs and have more control over hard coded lenghts, etc.

I have the fun job of increasing the field lengths of some of our SQL Table columns, Stored Proc parameters, Data Access Layer, GUI, etc. I am looking for a better way than the current way of having hard coded, or constants scattered throughout our code and SQL to define a field length of say 30. Thinking big, wouldn't it be nice to define a field length or schema in one location that both SQL and code could use for validation? Anyone have any best practices for this problem they would like to share? Thanks, Bill