A while ago, I set up a small Microsoft Access database that would track Church committee membership.  It manages basic information about committees and the people who belong to them.  It also includes a couple very basic reports. 

It's far from a 'complete' solution, but it's probably a pretty good starting point for a bigger project.  I thought I'd post it here in case anyone wants to give it a look. 

Church Committees.mdb (1.01 MB)

When you are entering dates in an Excel spreadsheet, you might want to enter just the numeric part (i.e. without any dashes or slashes), hoping Excel would figure out what you were doing and turn it into a 'real' date automatically.  You might think Excel has a built-in cell format you can apply that would handle this for you...it apparently does not. 

You can, however, build your own 'custom formatting' rule for a cell to accomplish this.  So, for example, if you want to type in '112507' but have Excel transform that into '11/25/07', you would set up your custom format (using Excel 2003) like this:

1. Right click the cell, choose 'Format Cells...'
2. In the 'Category' list (on the left side), scroll down and click on 'Custom'
3. In the 'Type' textbox, type in your new rule (in this case '0#"/"##"/"##', with out the single quotes)

Now, when you type in that cell, your date will be reformatted according to your new rule. 

To apply this custom format to an entire column of cells: 

1. Right-click your custom-formatted cell, then click Copy.
2. Highlight the cells you want to apply the format to, then right-click one of them
3. Choose 'Paste Special' from the context menu
4. Click 'Formats' from the 'Paste' group

So, 'Rainbow Portal 2006' was released just after the fall developer's meeting in Italy.  Since then, the development list has been extremely quiet...no news is good news?  Hopefully, others are just working independently or taking some time to catch up on other things. 

I've been deploying commercial Rainbow Portal powered sites for a few years, now, and I'm at least somewhat familiar with most aspects of 'how it works'.  At one point or another, I've been elbow-deep in almost every dll in the portal...and I've been pretty impressed with the effort put in by those that have contributed. 

My point is that at some point through all this, I forgot how 'cool' the whole concept of a self-managed portal/website really is.  On two separate occasions in the past 10 days, I ended up explaining/demonstrating the portal to good people that aren't programmers and for whom HTML, CSS, and C# are totally foreign.  It was fun (refreshing?) to hear them shaking their head in wonder and amazement...especially since they saw how they could easily maintain a website 'themselves'. 

That's cool, guys (ok, it's 'nerdy cool').  My point is that the Rainbow Portal project has done good things for a lot of people...in a number of ways.  Obviously, it has provided an easy, powerful, and inexpensive means for plenty of people to 'get a web site'.  I've customized it to extend the useful life of (and interact with) a 20-year old property/evidence management system, with results better than I could have imagined (and saving an ungrateful 'customer' thousands of dollars in recovered time).  Dozens (hundreds?) of commercial web sites are running strong with Rainbow in the backend.  Along the way (as in my case) it has also improved the skills of the programmers involved in it. 

Hopefully this post will draw enough attraction from Google to bring some of the core Rainbow developers out to view it...thanks again, guys, and Happy Holidays.

I won't be surprised if someone can look at this and point out the problem right away, but I'm also ashamed to say how long I've been looking at it and trying to make it work...

private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e) { 
  DataTable dt = new DataTable(); 
  dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("id",typeof(int))); 
  dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("name",typeof(string))); 
  
  DataRow dr = dt.NewRow(); 
  dr["id"] = 6; 
  dr["name"] = "City1"; 
  dt.Rows.Add(dr); 
  
  dr = dt.NewRow(); 
  dr["id"] = 7; 
  dr["name"] = "City2"; 
  dt.Rows.Add(dr); 

  this.ddLabList.DataSource = dt;      
  this.ddLabList.DataTextField = "name"; 
  this.ddLabList.DataValueField = "id"; this.ddLabList.DataBind(); 
}

The this.ddLabList.DataSource = dt; line gives an 'Object reference not set to an instance of an object' error.

Help!

It took a while for me to find enough examples to put together a method that will calculate the distance between two GPS points (using C#), so I thought I'd post my end product in the hopes it will shorten someone else's search.  Credits to 'The Math Forum' for the formula (http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/51879.html)

The code looks terrible in a browser, so I've attached it as a text file. DistLatLong.txt (1.54 KB)

I just ran across this awesome repository of Windows Scripting samples...

http://www.ericphelps.com/scripting/samples/

On an ASP.NET page with a couple DropDownLists, this problem surfaced. 

When the page is called, it tries (unsuccessfully) to select the appropriate item in the DropDown, based on data retrieved from the database.  The reported error is “A dropdown list cannot have multiple items selected“, even though I'm only making one selection. 

Most of the offerings I found on the Internet said that one or the other of these selection methods must be used.

[YourDropDownName].Items.FindByValue([YourDataFromDataBase]).Selected = true;
ListItem objItem = [YourDropDownName].Items.FindByValue([YourDataFromDataBase]);
[YourDropDownName].SelectedIndex = [YourDropDownName].Items.IndexOf(objItem);

I think both of them are OK to use.

The solution is to call the ClearSelection() method of the DropDownlist immeidately before selecting the value for it.  I found it here, at the very bottom of the post.  I never had to do that before, but it works!

If I have a Strongly Typed DataSet that Visual Studio 2003 created for me, I (think I) should be able to do the following:

Given a Strongly Typed DataSet created with a Table named 'Names', which has two columns named 'FirstName' and 'LastName'...

dsContacts ds = new dsContacts();
DataRow dr = ds.Names.NewRow();
dr.FirstName = “John”;
dr.LastName = “Bowen”;

The problem I'm seeing is that Intellisense doesn't make the columns' names (FirstName, LastName) available.  In fact, I can't figure out ANY way to list columns for the DataRow dr. 

According to the Microsoft examples listed here and here, this sure seems like it should work...?

I noticed this post from Ed Daniel a few days ago, but didn't get a chance to check it out until today.  I really dig the format (short video interviews, quick and to the point). 

I agree with this guy...who agrees with this guy... 

Although, as I look around, I have five different 'Teach yourself/Learn X in Y days/Hours' books on the shelves.  *blush*