Chris Hammond

Wireless Revo Part II

Main feed problems

West Coast Chopping

Well, I am just about to leave the west coast. My flight actually leaves in just about 6 hours, I should be sleeping before heading to the airport, but I am up typing away...

Me and my brother went by West Coast Choppers today, it's just up the street about 10 minutes from the house here in Long Beach. I don't quite know if we saw Jesse James or not, we may have, someone darted off on a dirt bike when we were getting out of the car, and there was quite a crowd watching him, so I can only assume it was JJ.

Here are a few photos from the shop.

I also hit up In-n-Out tonight, had to get a Double-Double before I leave! Bought another dble-dble for Russ and a t-shirt for myself. Hopefully Russ will get back from Florida soon to eat it, or else it'll spoil, but it's probably already spoiled.

Wireless revolution!

Well, I have used WiFi at VS Live in San Francisco last February, but other than a few minor runins with the technology that was the limit of my experience with it, until today.

My dad has been asking about 802.11b and 802.11g. He works for Boeing, and I guess they recommend using 802.11b for a home network if you want to connect to their VPN for work. I talked him into going with G, saying that for future upgrades to their home they may as well get the faster network now. Not that 802.11g won't be obsolete in three years, that never happens in this business right? ;) (as for it being obsolete, as I said, I don't have much experience with WiFi, so what I say is just me talking out of somewhere other than my mouth)

I brought the router home for them, hooked it up, and boom, everything works. I love sitting down here on their lower level and working on my laptop, no wires, no nothing. I went outside, got a strong signal just as well as inside. So, you may say, that's old news, but it's new to me!

I need to get my own place instead of all my toys so that I can outfit it with cool new toys such as WiFi! WiFi in my apartment right now wouldn't do much for me, but I bet a neighbor or two would like to jump on that bandwidth.

It's Christmas Eve, so Merry Christmas to everyone. Hope everyone is safe, and has a white Christmas if that is what they wish for. I am here in Long Beach, hopefully it'll stay dry tomorrow, I think it's still raining right now.

ASP.NET Forums XML Import/Export

Well, It's just about Holiday Season. By this time tomorrow I'll be sleeping in a strange bed at my folks new house in Long Beach. This will probably be the first “real” vacation I've had in 5 years? I don't count all my weekends in the summer racing as vacation, even the week I take off for nationals, it's more work than vacation. I'll be out in California for 5 days, back to St. Louis on Sunday morning. Should be a good time, seeing most of my family, and hopefully a friend or two from high school.

One thing I find is that when I go out of town, I usually get a crapload of work done! So this trip is tasked to work on the ASP.NET Forums V2 XML Import/Export routine. The goal is to create a windows form app that imports XML files into the ASP.NET Forums Database, Rob Howard has already created a few ASP pages that do the same, so I'll probably just take his code, convert to VB.net and work from there.

The second goal is to create another windows form app that will accept flat files from UBB.Classic V6.4.0.1, and up, and convert them into the necessary files for the Import/Export app. Eventually I'll try to add other BB software imports as well, but being that I run two active UBB.Classic boards, solo2.org and sccaforums.com  that will be my primary focus, I hope to convert those sites over to ASP.NET Forums V2 sometime in the spring.

Happy Holidays to everyone and be safe!

T-SQL Rant

Time to rant a little about 'GO'

I have a SQL script (created from enterprise manager) that I wanted to call from a windows form to create a database on a local instance of SQL server. After about 30 minutes of trying to get it to work I figured out that the problem was 'GO'. GO only works for apps such as query analyzer and enterprise manager.

I was reading the file in a steamreader, and then trying to run that code using the data application blocks executenonquery.

To get around this I just pass the file in question to an OSQL command, and let it run outside of my application, while my application waits for it to finishing running before allowing the user to complete the next step.

The little frustrations you face every day developing, I love figuring things like this out, makes the day much more interesting.

The oddest things you find

I've been working with this MSDE install app for two days now, and having a few problems doing so. I've been to MS' MSDE pages often, and when I went back there this afternoon I seem to have found a little problem.

On this page http://www.microsoft.com/sql/msde/downloads/download.asp

I get the following two screen shots

And the bottom of the same page

It appears to still be broken as I can recreate it, don't know who to notify, but hopefully someone will catch this soon enough.

DTS and VS.Net upgrades don't play well!

First off, thanks to Rob for setting me up with a blog over here at weblogs.asp.net!

The Replication question I posted late last week has been answered, I think. We are setting up a second database that will hold a 4 tables for each of the remote sites. Then we will have a process running to take changes to the main database, and store those changes for each of the sites into the site's 4 tables in the staging database. There will be process at the site running to get changes from the staging database, apply them to the site's database, and also push any changes from the local database to the staging database to be grabbed and put back into the main database.  It's quite a bit more complex than that, but that's the basic structure of things..

Here's what I am trying to do

One late night last week I created a DTS script that pulls data from the Main database, into a database I created, that has all of the same tables (minus a few) that are not necessary for a property database. I created this with the data import wizard, which would pull all of the database information to the new database, I saved this as a DTS, saved the DTS as a VB (bas) file so that I could then go through it with a text editor and add a few where statements to some of the tables, so that for specific tables it would only pull the data for a Property, not for every property.

I imported this BAS file into a VB6 .exe file so that I could then run the executable and write the DTS back into the SQL Server DTS section. I ran the DTS, made a few changes to the work flow so that the data would pull properly without any FK errors. Fine and dandy you say? I thought so too. The problem so far is that the DTS is hard coded for one location, so what I need to do is get a variable into that DTS so that all the where statements use a variable, instead of a hard coded PropertyCode.

To do this I tried the following. I exported the newly modified DTS to a VB (bas) file, and brought it into a new VB6 .exe project. My intentions were to import this project into VS.Net 2003 so that I could then modify to my hearts content and integrate this data download as part of a windows form application. Well, upgrading the VB6 project into VS2003 didn’t work, it hung for about 2 hours before I stopped the upgrade. I then upgraded it to VS2002, and it worked! But not really, there were 65 tasks in the DTS script, 65 functions in the VB6 project, and now there are 15 in the VS2002 project.

So at this point I am stumped. I am going to try to re-export the DTS to a VB file, and then create a new VB6 project, and then attach the DTS to this project and then try to upgrade that project again. I have tried a few times on the other VB6 project, and each time the upgrade stops with 15 functions, the weird thing is it seems to think it’s complete, and doesn’t report any errors or warnings about not having imported less than half of the program.

I plan to use this blog to discuss projects I am working on, and especially the little things, things that make .NET easier to use, short cuts, and other programming theories and practices.

Now here’s a little about myself. I am an application developer for a small company in St. Louis, Missouri. We develop applications for internal and external use for our business and our customers. I have been developing in .NET for almost a year now, my main focus prior to working with .NET was ASP, with some Perl and other scripting language experience. At one time I was a web developer for The Sporting News, it was a great place to work, but the pay sucked and business wasn’t going so well for them.

I also do quite a bit of work on the side, I race my 03 350Z, and have a few racing websites that I maintain, solo2.org and SCCAForums.com being the primary focus. I am a partner in a racing supply business, SoloPerformance.com. I’ve been doing a lot of development for DNN lately, and plan to keep using it for current and future projects. Thanks for taking the time to read all this, I’d love to know what you think!

One more thing, my prior blogs can be found at thetrashman.com!

UPDATE

I tracked the problem down to an error with the VB exported file from the DTS. Some of the lines of code in this file were not properly separated by line breaks. Once I properly separated those lines (search and replace) the VB6 program imported into VS2003 without any of the problems I had experienced before. I then only had to modify the code to correct for syntactical changes and it's ready to go! So my title was incorrect, the problem wasn't DTS and VB.Net, it was strictly DTS :)