Shopping website critique

This is a brief critique of the City Software website, complete with a product taken through -almost- to the point of purchase. I would have gone all the way, but I would most likely have had divorce papers waiting for me when I got home.

First Blog for Diploma 2010...

This is my first blog for 2010. I have just started the Diploma part of my course, and this blog makes up part of my assessable marks.

Please stay tuned for all sorts of insights -and laughs, my God will I supply laughs. If there was a programmers stand up club, I would be a star- and, well, just general bollocks really.

Database types and definitions

This weeks blog task has two parts:

1. What is a database? In our own words, describe what we think a database is.
2. What are the different types of databases? Give examples of the different types of databases.

Wikipedia describes a database as:

A database is an integrated collection of logically related records or files which consolidates records into a common pool of data records that provides data for many applications.

If I was putting this in to my own words, I would describe it as a collection of information that is structured in such a way that any relevant information is easily accessible.

The second question is open to a bit of interpretaion. Many of the answers in the class had things like MySQL, Oracle, Access, SqlServer. According to WikiAnswers, the different types of databases are, "Hierarchical, Network, Relational, Object Relational".

Studying for Chapter 8 test...

One of the questions in the practice test was this one from the True/False section:

• 8. Only six different types of exceptions can occur in a visual basic program.

Now, I don't know about you guys, but I looked, read then re-read the chapter, headbutted the wall (thank God we don't have a cat, for it would surely have been kicked) and yet I still couldn't find a definitive answer to this question.

I know, I know... Page 592 has a table with six exception types in it. But I direct you to the paragraph above the table:

Different types of exceptions can occur. The table shown in figure 8-46 identifies some of the of the possible exceptions.

Does this meant the correct answer is False? The table after all only shows six exceptions and it doesn't say anywhere in the text, "This list is by no means exhaustive or complete" etc. So you could probably make a case for saying that the answer is True if you really wanted to push it.

Anyway, I went searching and found another, larger, yet still by no means exhaustive, list of exceptions. It can be found at http://www.exforsys.com/tutorials/vb.net-2005/vb.net-exceptions.html and succeeds where the book fails, gives us a definitive answer to the question.

And just in case you are wondering... Yes, I am grumpy. Bloody Cats!!! Someone must have swapped their playbook with The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy because it apparently has the words "Don't Panic" written across the front in large, friendly letters. Yeah right, 7 of our best 22 out injured and another 6 of them playing with injuries or just out of form, four weeks from finals... Nah, don't worry about panic, I think we've moved beyond that point. Next stop, despair.

Cats and Dogs Assignment

I discovered a few things while doing my Cats and Dogs assignment. Firstly, you can make one panel the child of another panel without realizing it. I made this mistake as I have four panels that fit in to the space of one panel. When I slid them in to place manually, one of the panels wouldn't show up because it was the child of a different panel which, through the code created had had its visibility set to false. This meant that the program would fail to run properly.

What I had to do to fix this problem was to extend the form and seperate all of the panels. I then set the panels in to position using their Location property and then resized the form back to its original size (i.e, big enough to hold one panel). From this point, the program ran perfectly, showing all the panels at the appropriate times.

Another thing I came across was the use of images. I had them set from an absolute path on my memory stick. The problem was that when I handed the assignment in, Rachael wouldn't have access to the pictures for the slide show. I figured that there had to be a way to set the pictures in to the program itself, but I could not see how to do this. I tried putting the pictures into the Resources folder, but I had dragged and dropped and it didn't work when I tried to use Intellisence. I found a very easy to use example for adding pictures to your resource folder written by Craig Cureton, one of the students in the other Cert IV Programming class and this problem was also solved.

I still have two assignments to get done for Programming, the Class Diagram and the Alarm Clock. I'm hoping to have these done by the end of the week.

Methods used in Now function...

Our blog task this week is to list the methods that can be used in the Now function. Our assessment involved using the Now function, but we used it in a very simple way. So Rachael has given us this task to show what other methods can be used.

If you want to display the time in a label for example, you might use something like this:
lblCurrentTime.Text = Now
This will retrieve the current time and date from the computer and display it in the label lblCurrentTime. If you only want to display the time though, you would need to do it like this:
lblCurrentTime.Text = Now.ToString("HH:mm:ss")
This will display the time in Hours, Minutes and Seconds. It will only show the time when the program starts though, it won't keep updating the time to keep it current. If you want it to act like a clock, you need to add a Timer function and put this code in to the function as well.






I have been posting a little bit on this function in recent times, relating to my sleep calculator. What I'm going to do is use this function to create a real, bonafide sleep calculator, but that will have to wait until the workload of assignments has thinned out a little bit.
Anyway, what other methods can be added to the Now function? So far ToString has been added. According to the list in Intellisense, the following can be added as methods to the Now function:

• Add (AddDays, AddHours, AddMilliseconds, AddMinutes, AddMonths, AddSeconds, AddTicks, AddYears)
• To (ToString, ToLongTimeString, ToOADate, ToShortDateString, ToShortTimeString, ToUniversalTime, ToBinary, ToFileTime, ToFileTimeUtc, ToLocalTime)
• TryParse, TryParseExact
• Compare, CompareTo
• DaysInMonth
• Equals
• From (FromBinary, FromFileTime, FromFileTimeUtc, FromOADate)
• Get (GetDateTimeFormat, GetHashCode, GetType, GetTypeCode)
• IsDaylightSavingTime, IsLeapYear
• Parse, ParseExact
• ReferenceEquals
• SpecifyKind
• Subtract

I spent a couple of hours searching the internet looking for a list like this one. Once I finally used my brain however, I realised that I could find what I needed in Intellisense. I'm not too sure what it is that all of these methods do, but I'm sure we'll be finding out at least some of them in the coming months.

Using your computers date for the sleep calculator

I had someone post a comment the other day asking how the "rather silly sleep calculator" could use the current date according to the computer to make it's calculation. First of all, let me say that I'm scared, I didn't mean to get readers :-). Secondly, it's really cool that any of them take the time to comment let alone read anything I post.

Anyway, I want to point out straight off that my program probably wouldn't work as is with the computers own date. The reason for this is that the program (as I wrote in the original post on the sleep calculator) uses short years and months. You will lose 5 days in a normal year (6 in a leap year), lose 1 day for seven months each year and gain 2 days for one month (except in a leap year when you only gain 1 day for that month). No, to make this workable, a whole new equation will need to be worked out.

Having said all of that, I did some digging and found that you can use the Now() function to use the computers date. I get the distinct impression that this function is for older versions of VB. I can tell you that in Visual Studio, it comes up black.

A reader by the name of Jack posted this comment:

My.Computer.Clock.LocalTime.Year
this is the code that shows the year from your computer system, and you can try the month and the day as the same.

which would make sense (however, it was posted on April 1st local time...), but you would still need to store the result in a variable obviously.

I also found a pretty cool site called Top54u that showed how to display the date in various formats once you've captured it. I'd love to look into this further and redevelop the "rather silly sleep calculator" into an awesome and actually usable sleep calculator. I have the next two weeks off class, so I might give that a shot during the "break" (a term used very loosely as I have HEAPS of work to catch up on in the time).

Anyway, I hope there has been some helpful stuff in here and thanks to everyone who has been reading and keep the comments coming.

All the best,

Tim.