First “On VB” column published in Visual Studio Magazine

My first “On VB” column was published on the website of Visual Studio Magazine.  It is titled “Calling Win32 API Functions in Visual Basic 2010” and is available at http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2010/04/20/call-win32-api-functions-in-vb.aspx.

This article discusses the value of reaching beyond standard managed code and taking advantage of the functionality available in the native Win32 API, including some functionality not currently available via managed code.

Hope you find it informative and useful.

 

Joe Kunk
Microsoft MVP VB
Okemos, MI USA
May 19, 2010

SQL Server Trigger to Log Who Created or Last Modified a Row and When

 

I implement this trigger to automatically update the CreatedOn, CreatedBy, ModifiedOn, ModifiedBy fields on almost all tables that I create in SQL Server so I decided it was time to share. 

Even if you don’t think you need this trigger, I can assure you that you will be glad you added them at some point in the future.  It is just so useful to know who created or modified the rows when data quality issues arise.

This trigger is not a full audit trail, it only retains information on the latest change.  A full audit trail would require at least one dedicated audit table and is a much more involved, whereas this is simple to implement.

It assumes a unique primary key on each table and works for both SQL user accounts and integrated security.

This example was taken from a SQL Server 2005 database.  I have successfully used the same trigger in SQL Server 2008.

Hope this helps.

Joe Kunk
Microsoft MVP VB
Okemos, MI USA

Create TRIGGER [trgMyTableCreatedModified]
ON dbo.MyTable
AFTER INSERT,UPDATE
AS
BEGIN

SET NOCOUNT ON;
Declare @now datetime
Declare @user varchar(50)

SELECT
@now = GetDate()
,@user = user_name()

UPDATE T SET
CreatedOn = COALESCE(I.CreatedOn, @now)
,CreatedBy = COALESCE(I.CreatedBy,@user)
,ModifiedOn = @now
,ModifiedBy = @user
FROM inserted I
JOIN dbo.MyTable as T
ON T.MyTableKey = I.MyTableKey

END

Displaying External HTML file content in Microsoft MVC

 

We are developing an application where one of our MVC views is simply to render HTML snippets from an external file.  Since our favorite internet search engine did not turn up any information on how to do this, I am posting the following information. 

In our case the external HTML is a fairly simple snippet without javascript or form tags, so no manipulation of the file contents is required before display.

You can quickly read in the entire file to a string as follows:

using System.IO;
…
public static string GetHTMLContents(string filename)
{
    string results = string.Empty;
    if (File.Exists(filename))
    {
        results = File.ReadAllText(filename);
    }
    return results;
}

Then just place that string in the ViewData with a command like

ViewData["HTMLContent"] =  results;

and in the View render it with code that looks like:

<span style=" text-decoration:underline">HTML Content:</span><br/>
<%= ViewData["HTMLContent"] %>

Hope that helps.

Joe Kunk

Microsoft MVP


Okemos, MI USA


January 16, 2010