Have you ever had a computer day where you put in something like x = 2+2 and then x turns out to be 352,648,137? Well, I had one of those days todayB)
My client asked me to do some work with his program - extracting a database for a new user. This is a SQL Anywhere database with replication and he needed to add a new replicated database to the system. This was something that we originally had left behind, meaning to get back to it at later time and that later time just never came. The process isn't complicated, but the extracted database needs some massage after it's extracted. I had originally done this with batch files, simplest way as you just construct the sql files and then pass the name to the dbisql.exe command line tool. But I had some other batch files there and managed to execute the wrong one and I'm glad I wasn't working on a live database and that I had backups as it deleted the database!
So I decided to write a nice little program to act as a shell for this process and make it nice and easy to go through and do the extraction and all the little stuff that was needed around it. And that's when my day turned really interesting and things would work in the most mysterious ways! But in the end I prevailed and got most of it done tonight, with some minor work left for tomorrow morning and some clean up. On the positive note, this gave me an idea and most of the code for a simple product that fits well within the Icetips Utilities.
I also got some product related stuff sorted out. I have all the products in version control now, as well as some other non-product related projects so that is all coming along very nicely.
For those who are looking around in the world of .NET, I Discovered what looks to be a very nice tool for Visual Studio at DawliaSoft called Sculpture. It uses model driven code generation. It is open source so it is free but the models are about $99 each, but you can also buy bundles, see their price list They have some video tutorials which look good, but the audio is pretty bad. The company is based in Egypt and the speaker has a bit of an accent although I didn't have a problem understanding him. It is better to download the wmf files rather than watch the videos online.
Tomorrow will be a great day!:)
Arnor Baldvinsson
