Krehbiel Tech

I just saw this on Slashdot: Linked List Patented in 2006. It prompted me to write this knee-jerk reaction: Oh my god! It's widely known that the U.S. patent office is completely retarded when it comes to giving out software patents, but this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. What the hell could possibly possess them to grant a patent to someone for a process that millions of programmers have been using every day for decades?!? This is the most embarassing abuse of the patent system ever. Reform now before someone patents the if/then statement!

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I've had some annoying problems opening other people's ASP.NET web projects from Visual SourceSafe.  By default, it sets up the local IIS directory in C:\\Inetpub\\wwwroot regardless of the location of the solution directory.  I prefer setting up a virtual directory that points to the actual project location, which for me is on the D: drive.  After a bunch of trial and error and some Google searches, I've found the following steps work somewhat reliably.

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I thought it would be good to sit down and evaluate where I am with uvBlog in comparison to my stated goals. Points in italics below were my original goals.

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I had the "opportunity" to fix someone else's SSIS package that was failing because of a data overflow on a date column at one of the data destination components.

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To follow up on yesterday's mystery date problem: It turned out that one of the incoming dates had been erroneously entered with the year "1007" instead of "2007." The date was valid on the Oracle data source, and it was valid within the SSIS data flow. However, SQL Server 2000 can't store a date prior to the year 1753, so the data destination failed. I put in a script component to test for dates earlier than 1753, set them to "1/1/1753", and flagged the row with an error. Now all is working without the icky "ignore errors" setting.

I used to be the kind of person to upgrade software immediately as soon as new versions were available, because it used to be true that upgrades meant there would be some kind of improvement. But lately Microsoft has been working to redefine the term "software upgrade" to mean "an entirely different application rewritten from the ground up without any quality control." First there was Visual Studio 2005, which is definitely quirkier and slower than Visual Studio 2003. Then, in the same vein, there's SQL Server Business Intelligence Studio, which I've had the pleasure of using for a year now. It has one of the slowest and buggiest interfaces in a Microsoft product I've ever seen. How is it even possible that the faster the computer hardware gets, the slower the applications run?

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I thought it might be fun to review some of my earlier programming projects on this blog.

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Amazingly enough, I hadn't run across this situation before.  I was writing a quick utility to generate a C# class from a database table today, and I discovered that the following code failed.

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Today's lesson is about how to avoid those annoying messages that SSIS gives you about being unable to decrypt sensitive data in a package.

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