As always we started the day with meetings. Today, we finished up the initial database design portion and actually started making tables and merging the data together. I suspect that we will have at least one maybe two days left of just classifying and merging data.

There were several things that I learned today, most of it was MS SQL commands like (sp_who, sp_lock, sp_helptext, kill 60). It is always nice to see the commands in action and get a detailed explanation of what they return and do.

Jason Alexander showed use one other command it was

Select Top 1 * from cs_xxx

And he explained that it has a lot of overhead because it pulls down all the data and then returns the top result. So a better way of doing it would be to pull down only one result with the following:

Set RowCount 1

Select * From cs_xxx

Set RowCount 0

I’m always glad to learn little tips and tricks like this.

Also I’d like to point out that if your using XML Serialization and your going to be serializing a DateTime then please don’t make the same mistake that I made. I picked up the huge xml book that we have here in the book room and started reading. While I was reading I noticed that when they had a DateTime Property they used the following XmlAttribute: [XmlAttribute(DataType = "date")]. The problem with this attribute is if you are trying to serialize a class that has a DateTime property then it will cut off the time and leave you with the Date. Someone might say oh what is the big deal? The big deal is that you can lose up two 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds of time when you deserialize the data to use it.

After some research I noticed that a bunch of people where using this attribute, obviously they don’t care about loosing data or only need the date. At last to my surprise I learned that there was an XmlAttribute [XmlAttribute(DataType = "DateTime")]. So I made the changes and recompiled and like “Black Magic” 😀, everything worked as I had expected!

We went out to eat at Fuddruckers today; it was very filling since I missed breakfast. I really liked how you can choose the toppings on your sandwich, oh and you can’t forget to get a ton of cheese for your fries.

This weekend, I’m going to finish up the last details on my project. Also it will be part of my job to learn and play around with CodeSmith (code generation software). Hopefully I will get around to making my own templates. I really like the idea of “writing code that generates code”.

Read the complete post at telliterns.com/blaken/archive/2007/05/25/Initial-database-design-done.aspx

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