Jason's Code Journal

Day from Hell

This week, work gave me a new laptop, an IBM ThinkPad P4 2.4 Ghz. It is freekin huge. I mean, it is bigger than my old laptop that is 3 years old. Personally I don’t care how big a laptop is, cause I don’t do a whole lot of traveling. The good news is the laptop it super fast compared to my old one. I’m still getting used to the keyboard so if my typing is off in this post you’ll know why.

I was installing the OS and software I needed – Windows 2003 Server, SQL Server 2000, and Studio .Net 2003, etc. When I rebooted, I noticed that a service was not starting correctly. I checked the event log which said that the Machine Debug Manager could not start because the path could not be found. WTF? I just installed that with Studio. So I did a search for the EXE. Guess where it was found? My work network drive. How in God’s name did that happen? It turns out that when Studio .Net installed, it put all of the files that should have gone in c:\program files\common files and c:\program files\windows in my network drive. When the machine was booting, it did not have access to this drive and the OS could not start the services Studio installed there.

I tried uninstalling Studio.Net, but no luck. Everything was still left there. Also, I could not tell Studio to change where it was installing these files.

After about 4 hours of troubleshooting this problem, I gave up. I put the Windows 2003 Server disk back in the cd-rom, rebooted and formatted the drive again, starting from scratch. Luckily I had not installed that much software yet. This time I installed everything as the administrator of the local machine before I logged in as myself. I was not going to let Studio install anything on my network drive. Pain in the ASS.

Thanks for letting me vent after a frustrating day of setting up my new laptop.

Code Reviews

A friend of mine sent me this article today. I found it very interesting. For those of you that participate in or coordinate code reviews, it can be very helpful. I especially found the point about how manager participation can hinder code review productivity because people are hesitant to criticize their peer's code infront of their manager.

I love Buck Rogers Reruns

Recently Sci-fi channel started re-running old Buck Rogers episode. I can't believe I used to watch this show when I was young. It is laughable the sexual innuendo that this show got away with. Of course when they were on originally, I was to young and ignorant to get any of it. Gee I wonder why the princess needs three clones of Buck? Why is she having them come to her room? What would they possibly be doing there? Oh, and the porno music is way too much. All I can say is thank god for TiVo cause without it, I would never stay up till 2:30 AM to watch this show.

Creating a Collection using CollectionBase

In a purchase, you have to collect many different types of addresses: billing, shipping and credit. Rather than have a separate class for each address, create a single class to hold address information and include an address type. You then can create a collection of the Address objects and assign it to a customer. Here is an example:

Public Enum OrderAddressType
    Billing
    Credit
    Shipping
End Enum

Public Class OrderAddress
    Public orderAddressType As OrderAddressType
    Public strFirstName As String
    Public strMI As String
    Public strLastName As String
    Public strStreet1 As String
    Public strStreet2 As String
    Public strCity As String
    Public strStateProv As String
    Public strPostalCode As String
    Public strCountry As String
End Class

Public Class OrderAddressCollection
    Inherits System.Collections.CollectionBase

    Public Sub Add(ByVal oa As OrderAddress)
        List.Add(oa)
    End Sub

    Public Sub Remove(ByVal index As Integer)
        If index > Count - 1 Or index < 0 Then
            'ignore request
        Else
            List.RemoveAt(index)
        End If
    End Sub

    Default Public ReadOnly Property Item(ByVal index As Integer) As OrderAddress
        Get
            Return CType(list.Item(index), OrderAddress)
        End Get
    End Property

End Class

In the code above, CollectionBase was used as the base of the collection. In a simple Collection you only have the ability to identify the items in the collection by their location. If you need to identify the items in the collection by something other than the numeric index, then you have to use a DictionaryBase.

In my next post, I will give an examples of using DictionaryBase which I am working on now.