From a scheduled program I wrote on my laptop, I wanted to turn on an electric wall outlet, which would then turn on the cat’s auto feeder. The wife said she didn’t trust this to work, so she needed a video showing the cat being fed. So I combined all the Z-Wave tools with some other […]
Auto Feeding the Cat with Video Confirmation Read More »
I wanted to do some home automation, and I wanted to write the code myself (I’m a software developer.) I looked into it and decided to use Z-Wave technology. I started by buying a USB Z-Stick for about $45 to allow my laptop to talk to the different devices. This can control up to 232
Programming Your Home Read More »
I have all the changes archived to archive table using triggers, but this doesn’t record anything when a row is deleted. I created a dedicated table to record the deletes. Copy Text Copied Use a different Browser SET ANSI_NULLS ON GO SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO SET ANSI_PADDING ON GO CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Deletes]( [id] [int] IDENTITY(1,1)
Recording Deletes When Using Entity Framework Read More »
I create archive tables to log all of the changes made to a table. The archive tables look like the base table with a few columns added. Then the base tables need a trigger to insert the old row right before a change. I used the stored proc below to generate the archive tables and
Generating Archive Tables and Triggers Read More »
Surprisingly, SQL Server doesn’t automatically create indexes just because you have a foreign key. So at the end of a development project, I just used the script below to generate the SQL needed. Copy Text Copied Use a different Browser select 'create index indx_'+t.name +'_' + c.name + ' on ' + t.name + '('
Generating Indexes for Foreign Keys Read More »
I have 10 clients that each have a process that posts a value to my web service every hour at three minutes after the hour. I needed to know when a post doesn’t happen for a client. The logic of the SQL is that I want to return the last row posted for each Client
Notify Me When Something Does Not Happen Read More »
I wanted to monitor one of my system from my desk top and from my phone. I found a simple solution whereby I can subscribe to the result set of a stored proc by using RSS. So I can have this feed MS Outlook, my phone or my web browser. First, Visual Studio 2010 makes
Having the Result Set of a Stored Proc Sent to You by RSS Feed. Read More »
On one of our projects, we have a requirement that we have to change our passwords every 90 days. So I created a page where I can just click a button and it will generate a password, change the password on the database for the user in the connection string, and then change the password
Change Connection String Password Programmatically Read More »
I have a page in my ASP.Net application where I show all of my AppSettings, connection strings, etc. But I didn’t want to show the passwords. I wanted something like: server=MyServer;uid=MyUserId;pwd=*******;database=MyDatabase; So here is the code to strip out the password: Copy Text Copied Use a different Browser private string stripPassword(string connString) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(connString))
Stripping Out Passwords Read More »
I had a large number of XML files that each contained hourly prices for a lot of different locations. I needed to get all of the prices for a single location. I did this by loading all of the files into a table and then querying the table. First, I needed to change the rights
Uploading XML Files to SQL Server Read More »
