When the dataset class of your XSD disappears

dotNET

It took me some time to figure this out and now I feel like a dope, but I figure I would stick this in here for the next poor sot who has a similar brain …ummm.. gap.

I added some fields to a typed dataset. Since my brain was in sql data mode, I tagged one of the fields as a char rather than a string. No error message. Except the class file disappeared, my application wouldn’t compile because the class no longer existed.

I toggled the “Generate Dataset” option on and off and on and off to no avail. I viewed the xml. I closed and opened the project. Finally I tried “Preview Dataset” and it gave me a wierd looking error message but luckily the word “char” caught my eye and I saw the light.

Hope this helps someone googling for the same problem someday.

Do as I say, not as I do

Tools

I had a visit today from Ron Lewis from my user group who was helping my neighbor with a computer hardware emergency. Ron is a regular at the user group and he has been soaking up knowledge about .NET for over a year. But his real expertise is as a hardware guy. This is the same guy who brought Stephen Forte’s laptop back to life at our March 2003 meeting after repeated blue screen’s of death had Stephen relegating the box to the garbage can.

So Ron looked around my office and the quiz began. He asked a few questions about my UPS’s (yes I passed), was astonished at my 8 year old humongous HP LaserJet IVSI that still is in perfect working condition and impressed with the number and variety of p.c.s. He was a little curious about the Apple sticker on my monitor. It’s just a sticker though. My husband put it there to be funny and I left it, trying to be funnier. But then he asked me about my backup habits. This is like when the dental hygienist asks if you’ve been flossing regularly. Skip to after that conversation. We have a deal. He is going to call me in two weeks. If I am not backing up regularly (DAILY as I can’t really afford to lose more than a day’s work) by then, he is going to set me up on remote automated backup to his servers, which is a service he offers. That sounds cool to me!! I know there are gigantic companies who do this kind of thing with offsite data centers and offsite networks but this is just my size.

Common Problem Deploying WSE dependent Client Applications

dotNET

Well, I bet it’s common though I only found ONE post on the whole internet about it so I better add a little noise here, too. This is for WSE1.0. I will ahve to look into this in WSE2.0! I installed my client app onto another machine. It’s not on my domain so was synching against the internet time (a setting in Adjust Time/Date). My dev machine was synching against my own server which was +6 minutes.

(I’m starting to think of some UTC posts Clemens Vasters wrote a while aback that mystified me at the time…I’ll have to look )

Anyway, I was very quickly getting a Microsoft.Web.Services.Timestamp.TimestampFault error with teh message “Message Expired”. And the reason for this was that they tiem on my client app’s box was probably very different than the webservdr it was going out to (different also than my own domain). The easy solution is to set the timeout to “0”  (i.e. no time-out) on waiting for a response from the web services, but that’s not good to me, because I don’t want to make the user sit around all day waiting.

For now, I will just have to control this by controlling the installs (still not released yet) but eventually I will want a tighter solution. Thanks to Peter Bromberg of Egghead Cafe who answered the original question in the above referenced thread. That’s my kinda egghead! 

Pavlov and Powering Off my P.C. Monitor

Just Rambling

In the last [many] months, I generally work until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. We don’t have kids, but do have a few dependents – a wonderfully funny cat, G.B. and my beloved 10 year old Newfie, Tasha. These two have bed times, too. I know it’s 10pm because the cat suddenly appears, meowing, twirling around my ankles and wants to curl up in my lap. That’s because he likes to snuggle up next to me under the covers when I’m in bed, so this is the best he can do when I’m at my computer. (No wierd interpretations of this please). But the funniest thing is the Pavlovian reaction to the sound of me pushing the power button of my monitor to turn it off. Both the cat and the dog jump up. They know. “Finally, it’s time!!! She’s finished with that DAMNED thing and we can all go to bed.” Silly kids.

Whidbey and my favorite Method…GetDateTimeFormats

dotNET

I have written in the past about my favorite little method in the BCL – GetDateTimeFormats. There is only one thing that bugs me about it. You have to return an array and then get the element out of the array. For example

dim strArray() as string=now.getDateTimeFormats
dim myFavoriteFormat as string=strArray(1)  (1 happens to be like this 1/20/03 in the en-US culture setting)

But I always want to type it like this:

dim datewithMyFavoriteFormat as string=now.getDateTimeFormats(1)

I finally got around to seeing if Whidbey does this but it doesn’t.

add: And then I wrote this post and learned that I still have  a LOT to learn about arrays – after only 20+ years of programming!! Many are happy to show me the way!!

Dim datewithMyFavoriteFormat As String = (DateTime.Now.GetDateTimeFormats())(1)