Last night I was watching a little bit of idiot tube. I never watch a show called LA Ink but it was on and I was watching. There was a story of a little 11 month old baby that ended up with cancer and survived. I couldn’t IMAGINE what their parents were going through with that. Gratitude #1 is I’m SO LUCKY to have kids that are not sick and are healthy (knock on wood).

Gratitude #2 is I’m healthy. I have my little quarks here and there but overall, I’m healthy.

Gratitude #3 is I get to do what I love for a living!

Positive experience was my wife called me and told me to walk outside and wait for my daughter to walk home. As she crossed the street I just smiled at how beautiful my little girl has become. She’s 13 now and growing up quick. Wish I could stop her but I’m enjoying watching her grow.

Check it out:

One of his methods of achieving happiness before reaching your goals is a daily gratitude journal as well as keeping a journal about one positive experience you had that day.. So I’m going to start one here for the next 21 days.

Quite by accident I figured out what the issue was… My web browsers. Yep. Seems that ole Firefox OR Chrome decided to make my machine as inefficient as possible. Now, don’t get me wrong, they can’t take ALL the blame. I also blame 80% of the issue on adobe flash. I’m starting to see why flash and apple are battling against each other. What a horribly inefficient piece of crap flash is.

So I decided to do an unscientific test. I timed how long it took my machine to compile an 8 project application in Visual Studio with and without Chrome running. Then I tried the same scenario after I watched a video on youtube. Anyone want to guess? At LEAST twice as long to compile after watching a flash video.

I’ve tried IE (but haven’t used it in years) and Opera but I don’t like those browsers all that much. As it is now, I no longer use a web browser on my dev machine. I now use another laptop on my desk for streaming pandora, watching tutorials or anything else that requires flash.

So… If your machine is running slow, take a look at your web browsers as a source of frustration.

Public Function GetPackageInfos2 ( _
	strFolder As String, _
	connectionObject As Object _
) As PackageInfos

Notice the second parameter is an Object type? Yeah, uh… good luck finding out what it is on your own. Fortunately I figured it out and was able to use it in my project… and so that you can just read this blog and not waste a few hours looking for an answer.

Turns out the connectionObject parameter is looking for an SSIS connection manager object. So to get the GetPackageInfos2 to work you simply grab a reference to a connection manager and pass the connection manager object into the function. mConnections is an a Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.Connections object.

Dim app As New Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.Application
Dim cm As Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.ConnectionManager = mConnections("MyConnectionManager")
' pass in the root folder of "/"
Dim packages As Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.PackageInfos = app.GetPackageInfos2("/", cm)

For Each package as PackageInfo in packages
     Console.Writeline(package.Name)
Next

So it’s as simple as that. Grab the connection manager reference from an OLEDB or ADO.NET connection managers, pass it into GetPackageInfos2 and you got your reference.

Leave a comment if you have any questions.

Come on Godaddy.com!

This particular feature of Godaddy.com has been bugging the hell out of me lately. I’ll go and search on their home page for a domain to see if it’s available. Instead of automatically removing http or www they decided to be lazy and let you fix issues with your query rather than trying to adjust it themselves. Here’s an example.

I went to godaddy’s home page and entered in www.rocksthoughts.com in the textbox for “Search for a domain”.

When I pressed the “GO” button this was the error message I received on the next page:

So basically they are saying “Hey, we know what you did but we’re too lazy to fix it”. Seriously… It’s not that hard to either REMOVE the www. or use a regular expression to look for it.

In fact, here’s some code for ONLY looking at the domain.

I mean a very easy way to solve that is:

Dim url As String = UrlTextbox.Text
 
If url.StartsWith("www.") Then
    url = url.Replace("www.", "") 
End If

I’m just not sure why that error exists. Am I missing something or are the Godaddy engineers being lazy here?

My Book

I was lucky enough to be invited to write some chapters for the upcoming Professional SQL Server Integration services book. This was a very unique experience unlike anything I’ve ever done before. I’ve never had someone really judge my writing skills (or lack thereof) before. So to have someone judge almost every sentence I wrote was very weird. I’m sort of glad that I can get away with writing code that doesn’t have to be judged line by line (well, except code reviews). That said, I had fun doing it and now I get to put that on my resume. Having a book published by Wrox is a pretty significant career and resume booster.

My chapters in the book cover the programming side of SSIS in terms of writing custom components. In essence they will be the chapters that most BI developers skip right over but programmers will read. Not many BI Developers I know are all that interested in writing custom components. They prefer to write script tasks and components to do what they need. I have to agree with them for the most part but the problem with script tasks and components is the lack of re-usability. If they need to use the same code base again they basically have to copy and paste it over and over again. Which sucks. So my chapters cover the pain staking task of creating custom components that can be used in any ssis package they create without copy and paste. Yes, it is quite a pain to create them. I do it every day writing Task Factory.

While I liked the experience of writing this book it’s one of those things you have to try to see if you like it for yourself. It was never fun having the Technical Editor remind me that I forgot essential parts of SSIS in 2012 and having to go spend hours / days learning new undocumented classes. Anyone who’s ever had to cry their way through writing code with undocumented Microsoft classes knows the pain I was in.

Was it worth it? Absolutely! While I won’t be spending time in France having Gertrude Stein review my work, I’m pretty proud of this accomplishment. I do, however, look forward to spending time in a local starbucks. Maybe at some point, when I visit Charleston, with my buddy Patrick Riddle.

A few years ago I had a pretty nice blog going on RocksThoughts.com. I had lots of code examples and generally a lot of good information about writing software. But as is often the case, (A.D.D. anyone?) I forgot about the blog and moved on to other projects. I was getting quite a few hits to the site and looking back I could have monetized the site for a nice monthly recurring income. The reason I didn’t do it then is because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I was writing about cool stuff I found. I’m hoping to the same now.

SQUIRREL!!! (A.D.D. again). Seriously I walked away from writing this post for 45 minutes. I’d take a drug to control it but I hate prescription drugs. Anyways…

The one area I struggled with last time was writing about coding. I love coding but it’s only 20% of my life. Why should I write a full blog on 20% of my life. So this new blog will be about coding, websites, seo, sem, homebrew, family stuff, vacations, etc.

I’m not really writing for a specific audience and I doubt too many people will read this but I don’t really care all that much. It’s a place where I can write what I want (within reason) and have fun with it.

At this point if you’re still reading, that’s awesome. Congrats to you and hope you stick around for more.