Answer

school! BAH ive had enough school i got 4 classes left until i get my Bachelors in Computer Engineering :D Plus i do this as a hobbie, i dont feel like dropping my other nut to pay for it :p I dont mind doing the reading...Anyone got any examples of like flow charts or UML diagrams etc from REAL applications? I learn best from looking at how other people did it and have yet to find any really good examples.

I too have trouble in the planning phase. I have tons of good ideas, but dont know how to spit them all out onto paper in a way that would allow me to program from it. I do better to just start right off programming which i know isnt the correct way to do things, especially on larger applications. I am very interested if anyone has any good examples!

Sure, there seems to be a small bug, to get all the tool bars etc, you need to go to the view menu, and uncheck the different options, then recheck them. Once you recheck them, they will appear. I think it has somethign to do with the new dock manager control they are using. I have to admit that i dont use this ide myself, however i have been following it closely and like where its going. I dont know if it will do completely what you want, however it is for the 1.1 framework, so i imagine it can.

an interface is basically a contract. They are pretty powerful and you could use them for a plugin based application. Divils Plugin Article

i dont believe you can get the new features in vs.net 2002. hence the reason i pointed you to that becuase it works with the .net framework 1.1 :)

Right now, im currently evaluating Perforce, they are a commercial product, but they offer a two client license for free and also open source licenses. Two client works great for a single developer like myself, and the best part about it, is that it integrates with vs.net and comes with a bunch of other ways of accessing the depot. I still would like hear other peoples opinions on the matter....any negatives? Also, what software do you use?

Since its just a hobby, you might want to checkout Sharp Develop (#develope) it now supports vb, and its pretty freakin cool! Best of all, its completely free. http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/

I am a single developer as a hobbie basically. But im embarking on a pretty complex and large project. I have 3 computers i develope on, home , work and laptop. I currently have a zip drive connected to each with some syncronization software installed, so i jsut pop the disk in, it auto copies the files to disk, blah blah blah. Its very slick, clean and easy. I see though that a lot of projects use either CVS, subversion or perforce(i like this one). Besides the multiple developer issue, is source control something i should spend the time to learn and use given my situation? What do you guys think? Becuase im really torn on what to do!

Try not using the wizards, and manually specify the select statement and stuff of the dataadapter. I dont really know why it would matter, but whenever i run into a problem, i start to eliminate things one by one, usually starting with stuff i didnt specify myself.

You should nto be getting a delay. It seems like something else is screwed up. Possibly your connection string? Are you using the commandbuilder to make your queryies or anything, cuase i havent tried using that before so maybe thats it.

You need to reinstall from the command line give it something like this... setup.exe INSTANCENAME=VSDotNET SAPWD=password SECURITYMODE=SQL That last parameter is important!!!! second, if you are trying to access the database from a computer other then the one it is installed on or over the network you may have to run a small utility that is installed at runtime to install the tcp/ip pipes and adjust the ports etc...i know i had to do this, but i dont recalll of the top of my head exactly how i did it. It was small program located in the server directory after install.

Has anyone used llblgen Pro database mapper. I am considering using it, and i wanted to here some feedback from people who have used it.

It seems to me you can use ADOX to do it, but i am not sure how but i remember seeming some code somewhere that did it. I know it can create access databases, which you do that and then convert it to dbase through code.

There is also raptier, which has a free version available, but is limited to 15 tables and 15 views. http://www.sharppower.com/Default.aspx They seem to have good support also, as i have emailed them a couple times and i always get a response within 24 hours. One user stated, objectz.net was the most expensive, how do you figure? They are the cheapest, they offer the best free version i have found so far and even there professional and enterprise versions are $49.95 and $99.95 which is EXCELLENT for a college student like myself with no money. I only worry as they have a lot of unanswered questions on there forums and i have noticed that they have fooled around a bit with the support policy on there product. I currently am torn between using raptier and objectz. Each one has its advantages and disadvantages. has anyone used either and can give me some suggestions on what they have found?

anyone? :)

One other thing. It doesnt throw the error, until the column i just unhide is the viewable area of the datagrid. So if its not in the viewable region and i have to scroll to see it, it throws the error the instance the column is viewable.

I am creating a custom datagrid that inherits the windows forms datagrid. What i do on load is create teh 6 columns i need. I want to at run time however, be able to hide or unhide each column. I do not want to set its width to 0. So i created a new collection ( contains hidden columns ). And add the column i want to hide to this collection, then remove it from the datagrids collection. Everything works fine. To show it again, i add the column from my colletion to the datagrids collection. Everything works fine, until i try and remove the Column from my "hidden column Collection". It crashes and says object reference not found. Anyone got any ideas. I dont quite understand why i cant do this.

It is becuase of the JIT compiler and the garabage collector. I believe the JIT compiler actually loads stuff into memory prior to using it, to enhance performance while the application is running. Do a search on the garabage collector, there is a ton of info on it i just cant recall any good articles off the top of my head. Some of it may be the price of .net as windows forms in .net is completely different then vb6 forms which is what access uses.

Thanks for the reply. Well, the problem is keeping the id's syncronized between the access database and the sql database. I suppose it could have the windows app call a php scipt and return an id in xml format. But that will require the windows app user to have a internet connection. what i thought of doing is making another field in the sql database called web_id. And after i send the new rows to the webserver, it will return with the all the ids that were created on the web end. Then just store those values in the web_id column. for later use. If you dont mind, i would like to see that extra code as it may give me some ideas. Thanks!

Hey guys, i have been pondering this question for the last two weeks and have yet to come up with a good answer. What i got, is a custom E-commerce shopping cart that runs off of a filesystem database. I am trying to create a "offline" ( meaning not webbased ) way of maintaining products, categorys...all that good stuff. What im running into however. Is that each time a product or category is created, its assigned an ID value, which acts as a primary key. This primary key is used to identify the object in other tables, for example, what product belongs to what category. In my app i am going to be using MSDE and plan on importing and exporting products through a custom script. I am stuck as to how to handle this id issue though...becuase thje ids must be unqiue. SO if i have a user that is using the web interface, and another using the app, i might get a overlapping id, even though its actually two completely different products. Any ideas?

I have gotten partially through creating a class that executes sql statments to a database to create my databases. However i discovered this database project in VS.NET my question is, should i let vs.net create a script too make my database etc or should i use a custom class? I need to create databases with different names at runtime. Thanks for the help, as i am confused as to what i should or shouldnt be using!

Sorry for the newb questions, but i am just learing MSDE and SQL and i must says its pretty impressive. But i do have a few questions. #1, should i use store procedures to do my inserts, updates and deletes as opposed to using hte command object and executing a nonquery? #2, I am writing classes that represent the databases. Should open the connection object for each class for the entire duration of the classes life just once. Or should i open and close it for every function that requires having a connection, such as sending a insert command. Thanks for your help in advanced!

I have been doing some reading and messing around with MSDE. very cool i must say. ADO.NET once i understood it better also is pretty nifty. Thanks for forcing me into :) One question though? is there a way to tell the sqlcommandbuilder to put [] around a column name since its the same as a sql keyword? I know i could set the commands manually, but thats such a pain :) this is for writing a dataset back to the db.

Here is the code i was using to do my testing.... Dim cmd As OleDb.OleDbCommand cmd = New OleDb.OleDbCommand cmd.Connection = oOleDbConnection cmd.CommandText = "insert into products (id,code) values ('333','Hello')" Performance.Reset() For x As Integer = 0 To 1000 Try cmd.ExecuteNonQuery() Catch ex As Exception MsgBox(ex.Message) End Try Next MsgBox(Performance.Peek / 1000) Timing starts with the Performance.reset() line and ends with Performance.peek The only time my app will be doing mass updates is on one field in a database to change its sorting fields. And it will probably only be called once in a while. So its not that big of a deal.

Can MSDE be included in a install file so that a computer newb could install it? For instance, not having to give setup any command line parameters by the user. Second, Should i still use MSDE even for the single user? Third, should i use ADO or .NET data classes? Lastly, MSDE seemed slow to me, as when i did testing, inserting 10,000 records with ado and jet, using a server side cursor took 2.8 seconds. MSDE using sqlcommand object took over 15 seconds to do the same task! Is there a way to speed this up? Thanks for the help!