I've been sick for almost a week now. I hate being sick. I had grand plans of staying home from work and then getting all those other projects done while I was resting. Ya, that plan totally flopped and I actually had to rest, the non-computing kind. What a drag. Best of all I still feel like crap...grrr...here's a couple of things I've seen while resting of interest(to me):

Looks like FlameRobin go a new release, and is now 100 percent compatible wth Firebird 2.0.

Scriptaculous has a 1.7 beta out that includes some wicked cool morphing effects built on top of Prototype 1.5.0_rc2 that contains some bug fixes.  Check out the morphing demos here.

Lollygag AJAX framework.  I guess it's worth trying out(that name is so annoyingly stupid that it might keep me from trying).

My first crack at a ui for FirebirdSql was very pleasing. Flamerobin is a great ui for interacting with a Firebird SQL database.  Flamerobin has intellisense that's pretty intuitive.  I haven't used it much but from my initial bout of use today, it's pretty handy.  The intellisense is populated with key words as well as database objects.  Very cool.

FirebirdSql is great little database engine with a dot net data provider. I just got it up and running along with a little sample connection app to test connectivity from dot net. So far so good, no hiccups, it installed without hassle, and I connected the first time out with no probs, that's good software.

Here is the sample app to connect to the FirebirdSql employee database that is installed by default:

using System;
using System.Data;
using FirebirdSql.Data.FirebirdClient;

public class Driver{
  public static void Main(string[] args){
  try{
    Driver driver = new Driver();
    driver.Run();
    }catch(Exception ex){
    Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString());
    }
  }
  public void Run(){
    string connectionString = 
      @"server=localhost;user=SYSDBA;password=monkeyboy;database=" +
      @"c:\program files\firebird\firebird_2_0\examples\empbuild\employee.fdb;";
    string commandText = "select * from employee;";
    DataTable data = new DataTable();
    using (FbConnection cn = new FbConnection(connectionString))
    using (FbDataAdapter da = new FbDataAdapter(commandText, cn)){
      da.Fill(data);
    }
    foreach(DataRow row in data.Rows){
      for(int i=0;i<data.Columns.Count;i++){
        if(i>0) Console.Write(", ");
        Console.Write(row[i].ToString());
      }   
    }
  }
}

Download the sample code here: firebird-round-one.zip(3K)

Resources
• FirebirdSql Main Site
• .NET 2.0 FirebirdSql Data Provider Download
• DotNetFirebird - Using Firebird SQL in .NET
  

FileHelpers is a way cool tool that makes reading and writing to text files very simple.  I don't know how many times I've written some form of a csv reader and/or writer, but this would have saved some time.  Here is a simple example that is based on a codeproject article.

Assuming we have a pipe(|) delimited file of customers like this:

1|Chris Carter
2|Riley Carter
3|Anja Carter
4|Emmitt Carter

We could write a class to read each line as a strongly typed Customer object like this:

using System;
using FileHelpers;

public class Driver{
  public static void Main(string[] args){
    try{
      Driver driver = new Driver();
      driver.Run();
    }catch(Exception ex){
      Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString());
    }
    Console.WriteLine("Done...");
    Console.ReadLine();
  }
  public void Run(){
    FileHelperEngine engine = new FileHelperEngine(typeof(Customer));
    Customer[] customers = engine.ReadFile("customers.dat") as Customer[];
    foreach(Customer customer in customers){
      Console.WriteLine("{0}. {1}", customer.ID, customer.Name);
    }
  }
}

[DelimitedRecord("|")]
public class Customer{
  public int ID;
  public string Name;
}

Download the example - filehelpers-example.zip(44KB)

Resources:
• Main Sourceforge site
• FileHelpers v1.6.0 - Automatic File Import/Export Framework(The Code Project)

Hello World exampled posted on AjaxRocks.com on ASP.NET AJAX, formerly ATLAS.