I found myself working on another inherited application this week. As it with all inherited applications, especially ones as old as this one, the processes around deployment were a mess. In fact, most deployments had been done by hand with no standards around the deployment location. How was I supposed to write an upgrade for an application when I didn’t even know where it was installed?

At least the ActiveX DLL’s details were in the registry – retrieving them was a pretty simple two step process; you just need to know the name of one of the classes within your DLL.

Many people have requested the ability to run an SQL file, which holds multiple commands.  As the developer states, this is not really possible as the plugin cannot really deal with multiple result sets and errors.

This would be extremely useful, especially when doing a fresh installation of an application.  All of my application installations install the databases from script, for a number of reasons:

• Easier to do remote DB setup
• Easier to keep code under version control

 

I have recently become an avid fan of NSIS, the Nullsoft Installer Script. It is an extremely powerful way of creating installers, as it gives you control over almost every aspect the installer. Coming from a PHP/C#  background, I have also found it fun learning the quirky ways of using NSIS and am still not sure that I am doing things quite right.

I recently received a a large text file (many megabytes) which was a concatenation of many different smaller files.  The smaller files where of different size and the separated by a particular character. I did a quick Google search, but almost all of the file splitting applications available split files based on size.

I needed to split a file based on a certain ASCII character.

Once I got the initial data transfer up and running, I needed to place the whole thing into a transaction, I was doing multiple table transfers (with some data manipulation).  I could not have half a database transferred, even if I did throw an error.

I simply threw in an SqlTransaction, and made everything run inside that.

However, I hit an exception when using the SqlCommandBuilder to create the insert command:

The task was straightforward, or so I thought; create a small application that transfers an applications configuration information from the test database into the production database

This may sound like a simple topic, however for someone who is quite new to .NET and used to Visual Studio 6 (VB6!!!) this was quite a difficult thing.

There are so many web developers that do not know the correct usage of HTML (let alone XHTML). Why???

The answer is pretty straight forward, web development tutorials do not teach HTML. Even worse the authors do not understand HTML; there are plenty of tutorials with incorrect HTML. Thus, new web developers are taught how to program (be it PHP, Ruby or DOTNET) but are not taught the basics.

I have been developing for over 15 years! I started off programming in QBasic and Pascal, and then moved into the Windows world with Visual Basic and Delphi. While I enjoyed this, I soon found myself being drawn into the wonderful world of the Internet and have never really looked back!

A new year, a new site. On the periphery will endeavor to showcase the talent and hard work of the good people who work with Veraida. We will be maintaining blogs regularly, writing articles, and providing some code to download.