Endlessly Loopy

30 Days of Windows Mobile and Twitter

Since all three people that read this also read Chris Craft’s blog, I wanted to make a suggestion of an application to make for his series, “30 Days of .NET [Windows Mobile Applications]“. Since Chris Reeder is such a huge Twitter fanboy and we all know Chris Craft loves GPS, why not combine the two.

Note: Chris, you might could milk this for 2 days, one that you have your inputs and one that does the autoposting.

Note2: Does anyone see this as a simple route management tool as well? (Credit and 50% of the profits please)

I suggest a simple Twitter Auto Updater Program. The input screen would have 4 variables: Location (captured through GPS), Start Time, End Time, and Autopost Text. Other variables needed would be Twitter username and password.

The GPS location would be automatically captured, so no manual input would be needed. The Start Time and End Time would be the time range that the autopost would be entered automatically (ex. “Arriving to work” would have a start time of 7:00AM and end time of 9:00AM while “Returning from Lunch” would have a range of 11:00AM to 2:00PM). The Autopost text is the string that will be submitted to Twitter when the conditions are correct.

The actual autoposting would be a little tricky, as you would have to manage when the last time you posted each condition, so as not to have duplicate posting. I really think this should be a two-parter, and I’m sure Reeder would love this.

Posted in C#, Windows Mobile | No Comments »

Twitter

For awhile I kept hearing my Sunday School teacher talk about Twitter. I really didn’t pay attention to it, thinking that I might look into it. Over at StupidProgrammer, Chris put a video up describing how it works. Since there are quite a few people I know on it, I figured I’d give it a try.

I won’t be surprised if I don’t update as much as Chris does, but I am trying to get better. Also, I’ve added the java script twitter to the side bar to the right, and it should show my last 5 twitter entries.

Posted in Odds & Ends | 1 Comment »

Crystal 8.5 without SQL2k

I was having an issue last year where Crystal Reports 8.5 would throw a “Physical Database Not Found” error every time that I tried to print through Visual Basic 6. Other computers were not having the issue, so I knew it had something to do with my system configuration. As I had recently gotten a new computer, I reviewed the software list that had been installed and noticed that only SQL 2005 was installed, but not SQL2k. After installing SQL2k as a named instance, I could run reports from SQL 2005 completely fine.

Fast forward to this week. A client had moved from SQL2k to SQL 2005 while still using Crystal Reports 8.5 and Visual Basic 6. We were starting to experience the “Physical Database Not Found” error on development machines that only had SQL 2005 on them.

Our initial solution was going to be to put MSDE on the machines but disable it. Then I remembered a similar problem we ran into when initially releasing Crystal Reports. At that time, I had to use Dependency Walker to find the missing components we needed on the system. After loading up Dependency Walker, and selecting crviewer.dll, we discovered the systems were missing 2 files: msjava.dll and ntwdblib.dll. After loading and registering both those files Crystal worked with no problems without SQL2k.

Posted in Crystal Reports | No Comments »

30 Days of Windows Mobile Applications

Once of my previous coworkers, Chris Craft, has started a series of creating simple Windows Mobile Applications in .Net to help beginners out. His goal is to make one application a day for the month of June. Go on over and check them out! And good luck Chris.

Posted in C#, Windows Mobile | 1 Comment »