ADSI has been a royal pain for me too. It's one of those
things that MS doesn't provide adequate tools with which
to teach yourself. I mean, how many developers out there
are going to has access to a DNS or Exchange server so
that the connection strings can be set up properly? Most
admins just don't have the time to teach or show a
programmer how these things are done.
I remember when ASP first came out what a chore setting
up file DSNs and connection strings were. Finally a MVP
put up a website with very clear directions on the
dozens of different connection string settings for all
the databases out there. It was a lifesaver! Someone
seriously needs to do the same thing with ADSI, but MS
seems to have a wishy-washy relationship with it. Now
that .NET is out there, ADSI will get even less
attention, which is sort of tough for those of us who
love .NET, but have to work in classic ASP.
-GP
Look up a previous post of mine named
"Anti-Patterns"... There are many
examples of wrong practices, their effects and possible
solutions. You can take comfort in the fact that they
have far worse errors there than anything you or I could
ever think of :)
I actually have the "Anti Patterns"
book. Should help out..
Roy
I read with interest your story as a similar thing
happend to me recently. I didn't get fired but I feel
that as a result there has been a slight loss of
confidence in me. I was tasked with some complex work to
do and thought that I had thoroughly read the
specifications. Due to the way I sometimes speed read I
later realised that there were parts which I skipped
over which were considerably complex. This also led me
to grossly underestimate the time it would take. One of
the problems I had was that in my company I am the so
called "resident expert" so there
wasn't really anyone to turn to for advice. Granted
there are plenty of technical forums but that was not
the problem. The difficulty was the design. In
retrospect I should have 1. read the spec in detail, 2.
spent even more time thinking about the problem in
advance (I spent a weekend dwelling on it) and 3.
Perhaps overestimated the time frames. I would be
interested to hear what others would have done to
prevent this happening or how they would have approached
this.