Big Bad Code

As promised here are the main steps that I go through to setup new Windows machines for a better computing experience. Obviously these are just my settings so pick and choose what you like.

Personal folders
First up is your personal folders:

Create a folder with your initials: c:\jb (Your main personal folder)
Create a downloads folder: [...]

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Congratulations to Ryan Moore the author of the book, and everyone else over at Apress and Friends of Ed who worked to create this book.
If anyone out there is looking for a great start integrating the rich UI capabilities of Flash and the server side capabilities of .Net this is the book to turn [...]

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I’ll be setting up a new computer soon and keeping track of all of the little tweaks and utilities that I’ll install before it’s ready for prime time.
Look for the list here next week.

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I signed up for Google’s analytics package as soon as I heard about it.
For a little history Google bought a company called Urchin awhile back and have updated their reporting package and are now offering it for free. No upsell, no reduced feature list, just a solid package with a very nice interface. Way [...]

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Because Crystal Reports.Net has really poor documentation I’m going to post this here in case any other poor souls are running into this issue.
Basically a String type parameters have a length limitation of 255 Characters. I was passing in some text as a Parameter to be printed in the footer of a complicated report, [...]

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If you are concatenating a list of items and adding a spacer between them like a , or ; you’ll need to make sure the last entry doesn’t have that separator.
So you can do something complicated like figuring out on each cycle if this the last item and not adding it or you can [...]

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I subscribed to Make: magazine before it was even shipping. I knew it was going to be great.
After 3 issues I have to say that I am still very impressed with it.
If you are at all interested in how things work, or what kinds of modifications you can make to existing stuff this [...]

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So I don’t drive myself crazy anymore I am writing this down.
This is especially painfull because I am using an Access Database for some reason with a web application. Lord knows why.
If you get any .Net errors about Updatable queries etc check your file/folder permissions first.

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If you’re looking for a recursive file listing here’s some code for you.

Private Function RecursiveSearch(path as String) as Boolean
Dim dirInfo As New IO.DirectoryInfo(path)
Dim fileObject as FileSystemInfo
for each fileObject in dirInfo.GetFileSystemInfos()
If fileObject.Attributes = FileAttributes.Directory [...]

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.code {
word-wrap:break-word;
margin:15px;
padding:10px;
border:2px ridge white;
background-color:#eeeeee;
font-family:Courier New;
font-size:10pt;
}

I can’t believe it took me this long to figure this out.
But anyway if you want to get a reference to the root of your server in .Net you need to use

“~\”

For example:

Dim header As HeaderControl =
 CType(LoadControl(“~\controls\Header.ascx”), HeaderControl)

Anyway hopefully this helps someone out who is wondering about relative paths when coding in .Net
-Josh

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