Testing Grounds

In Vista, if you right click on some files in Windows Explorer, you can select Send to -> Compressed Folder to create a ZIP file.

I use this feature a lot. It’s great to be able to quickly zip up a project and put it on a USB key or e-mail it to myself so I can work on it elsewhere. But today I ran into problem.

There was an empty directory in the project, and I got a warning that says that, because the directory is empty, it cannot be added to the archive.

That’s fine, but what it does not say is that IT STOPS right there — nothing else is added to the resulting ZIP file! So I got home and found that I had less than half of my project.

I don’t know why empty directories aren’t allowed in ZIP files — that seems lame, but not including the rest of the the files (and not reporting that the operation is stopping) is a bug.

Tags: OS by stan
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I’ve made a lot of progress on my image gallery. It’s in ASP.NET, and initially my idea was not to use a database at all. Instead I’d just store image names, locations, tags, and descriptions in an XML file.

I got all that working, and all the lookups using XPath, but then I started wondering if this is a wise strategy. I like the idea that I can back everything up with a single file, and that I don’t have to mess with connection strings and all that jazz, but on the other hand, I’m sure to have threading issues, and the XML file could grow to be quite large.

Furthermore, I’ve been told both that XPath is slow and that XPath is fast, so I’m not sure if performance will be an issue either.

So last night I confirmed that I can access a MySQL database from ASP.NET, and now I’m thinking that is the safer way forward…

At any rate, I’ve learned a great deal about XPath and ASP.NET along the way, and may post some examples soon. With XPath in particular, it seems like the examples that are on the web now go from dead simple to esoterically complicated, with not much between.

Tags: ASP.NET, DB, XML by stan
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