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February 24, 2006
International Swoosh
International formats have bitten me again. This time it was because I was using the CultureInfo.InvariantCulture when parsing strings to dates. You don't want to do this because you want the Parse to use the machine's current culture info to validate the DateTime. You only want to use CultureInfo.InvariantCulture when saving to a file or restoring from a file. You use it when storing to the file so that the value is stored in a culturally neutral format. This allows me to save a Swoosh game file on my Pocket PC with the region set to English (Australia) and open that same file on my PC with the region set to English (United States). This will correctly handle the date value and it will show up as 24/02/2006 or 02/24/2006 depending on your settings.
This fix will be in the next version of Swoosh along with some new features like exporting stats to a CSV file and reports with lots of tempo free stats.
Posted by mikel at 09:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 16, 2006
TimeSnapper
I had read about TimeSnapper back when it won the Larkware programming contest but I just installed it. I've only used it today but so far I like it. The browse day form makes it easily to quickly go back and find out when you were working and when you were away from the PC. Since I try to log my time every few hours instead of at the end of the day or the week, I don't think I'll find the actual screen shots that useful but more so the timeline of when I started working and stopped.
Posted by mikel at 05:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 01, 2006
SQL Server Express and Windows XP Home
If you are needing to run SQL Server (I was using the Express version in this case) do not use the integrated Windows authentication if your clients will be running on XP Home.
XP Home uses simple file sharing, which you can not turn off. This causes the client to access the remote SQL Server using the guest account, not the currently logged in user. Since you don't want to give the guest account access to your SQL Server, the best option is to use the SQL Server authentication.
Once I figured this all out, it was a pretty simple fix to turn on the SQL Server authentication, create an account, and change the connection string on the clients. But it took a long time to figure out that XP Home's simple file sharing was the cause.
Posted by mikel at 09:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack