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Not everybody is a master of the obvious...
"Dark the dark side is. Very dark..." - Yoda
---
"Shut up, Yoda, and just make yourself another toast." - Obi Wan Kenobi
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Agreed! I have the problem myself. Well, maybe not that obvious but I always seem to miss stuff right in front of me 
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Ha! The company I am currently at has employed some consultants to re-implement a process we developed so it could conform to their pre-existing reporting system.
Every e-mail we received from them announced that they were putting their "Top (fill in the blank) person" on the task.
They claim to be Oracle experts and we use SQL Server. I've worked in both worlds so I know there are differences, but after we sent them all our scripts for creating the database, stored procedures and processing, we got an angry e-mail back from them that our scripts did not work. They had run the scripts and had gotten this error message.
Database not found
Their "Top Database person" wanted us to explain what it meant.
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
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BrainiacV wrote: Oracle experts
Ah, there is the issue...I've had to deal with many of those types of experts. 
Common sense is admitting there is cause and effect and that you can exert some control over what you understand.
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Yes, I've had to deal with my share of those as well, but in this instance I think it's a high school kid with a PC copy of Oracle 11. I've been trying to warn our VP that these are scam artists, but she met them in Vegas and their printouts looked marvelous. My feeling is that it should have stayed in Vegas.
I must say most of the Oracle people I met were alright Joes, although it was obvious they had attended the training classes just two weeks ahead of us. My problem was more the management at my company getting the SQL religion and thinking all queries could be solved with a single SQL statement (then why did they make PL/SQL?). After that, the core DB engine could have been written by the A Team, I found their user interface was written by the F Troop. "Bad END statement" really meant "Label not found", I guess the END statement was found before the label, therefore it was at fault. I wrote better parsers in high school.
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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I have to support some oracle systems, I think some consultants never saw a problem they couldn't solve without a cursor. Even if the table only contains a couple of rows, by design.
Common sense is admitting there is cause and effect and that you can exert some control over what you understand.
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My assignment at the time was match up binders to loose leaf contents. It was easiest if manufacturing knew how many binders to make with the content already in them. So I had three result piles, binders only, content only, combined binder and content.
Now do that in a single SQL statement. (That's not really a challenge, I'm sure someone could do it.) I was fresh off their two weeks of Oracle SQL training at the time. I knew it was going to be bad when I sat down at the conference table and the team lead turned to me and asked me why I was there. I was the programmer assigned to do this? OK, you can stay. So 50 minutes into the discussion of the project, the Oracle lead consultant (the one being billed at $300/hour instead of the minion $100/hour) pops in, gets a synopsis, and declares, "this shouldn't take more than two weeks," and leaves for the next meeting he is already late for.
I spent the first week staring at the problem, going around to the supposed Oracle experts, telling them the objective, and hearing them say, "That's an interesting problem, I'll give it some thought." So in the end, I said, screw it, I'm going to do it the old COBOL card-in, card-out way. I created two cursors (this being the mid-90's and cursors were cool) selected the data and sorted on a common column, and walked the two lists comparing them, creating a new record for each of the three bins.
In the meantime, my project partner, the one too busy to help with the programming, he was just there to "liaise" with the project principles, came by after two weeks asking where the output was. I said, "Did you hear me say it was going to take two weeks?" I had protested at the meeting, but the BIG BRAIN had spoken with his estimate and that was it. I handed it in a couple days later, but 80% Rob, as we called him (he would do only 80% of the work, declare victory and move on) threw me under the bus by handing in only two of the three files I gave him. This ended with a stakeholder in the project coming to my cubicle and telling me what a slipshod job I had done. Twenty minutes later of making an accidental enemy had me finally realizing what had happened. When confronted about this, 80% Rob said, "Somebody dropped the ball."
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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Real men don't read error-messages...
OriginalGriff wrote: notepad is a brilliant word processor
... it is 
(yes|no|maybe)*
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No it isn't. It won't let you set a light-on-dark colour scheme, and it doesn't respect Unix-style line ends. A (good) text editor to create simple HTML pages is a good word processor, though. (Or LaTeX if one is feeling academic.)
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BobJanova wrote: LaTeX
 
Greetings - Jacek
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s_mon wrote: Real men don't read error-messages...
Apparently neither did the poster of that "little gem"! 
Just because the code works, it doesn't mean that it is good code.
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That must have been some rogue Microsoft programmer who hard coded that. I can't believe that sort of meaningful message would have got through the globalization process.
"You get that on the big jobs."
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Cynic!
Probably right, but cynical...
Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together.
Manfred R. Bihy: "Looks as if OP is learning resistant."
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It should be noted that the URL does not appear to work! Anybody try following it and successfully got to a SQL Server download page? I know I couldn't, although it may be a local thing. Or maybe it is just such an old message that the link is not valid anymore?
Also, notice how the message reads "require sql server 2005 express or sql server 2005 express", what's the difference between the two options?
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@OriginalGriff
Just out of curiosity did you ask the guy if he was asking what his options are within installing SQL Server (or something like it) or if he actually was unclear about what the solution was?
In a former job we had very tight security even on developers and you couldn't just install whatever you wanted, you had to get IT to do it or let you do it. Based on the wording of the question which I assume you copy & pasted into your post, indicates (to me) that English may not be his first language and so the communication barrier could add to the confusion. Just a thought.
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Nope - his profile says "student"
Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together.
Manfred R. Bihy: "Looks as if OP is learning resistant."
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I just installed Linqer to convert some SQL to LINQ. Unfortunately, it bombed out on me, but not before automatically generating this code:
Protected Overrides Function GetViewAt(ByVal index As Integer) As System.Collections.Generic.KeyValuePair(Of String, String)
If (index = 0) Then
Return GetView0
End If
If (index = 1) Then
Return GetView1
End If
If (index = 2) Then
Return GetView2
End If
If (index = 3) Then
Return GetView3
End If
If (index = 4) Then
Return GetView4
End If
If (index = 5) Then
Return GetView5
End If
If (index = 1461) Then
Return GetView1461
End If
If (index = 1462) Then
Return GetView1462
End If
If (index = 1463) Then
Return GetView1463
End If
Throw New System.IndexOutOfRangeException()
End Function
This is about as bad as my 558 lines of QuickBasic glory. 
This is probably one of those instances where 3 lines of reflection code is better than 5,000 lines of auto-generated code.
Driven to the ARMs by x86.
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Noooo! Use a Select Case statement instead!
Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together.
Manfred R. Bihy: "Looks as if OP is learning resistant."
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CodeDOM doesn't support switch; and I have seen the C# equivalent of that out and about.
He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes. He who does not ask a question remains a fool forever. [Chineese Proverb]
Jonathan C Dickinson (C# Software Engineer)
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AspDotNetDev wrote: 3 lines of reflection code
do you mind explaining how? im novice at reflection 
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See my alternate tip/trick here. That uses reflection to get all properties of a certain type and then sets their values. Using reflection, you can also invoke a method using a string that is the name of the method. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Driven to the ARMs by x86.
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The machines are taking over... even stupidity isn't save...
(yes|no|maybe)*
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Okay, which would you rather tell your boss at the end of the day:
1: I wrote 3 lines of code.
2: I used a code generator to write 5,000 lines of code for me - saved me 2 full days of work.
I'm mean hey, it's your career but if you keep going for efficiency over productivity you'll be selling hotdogs on a street corner before long. The difference is that of actual value vs. perceived value - one will get you a raise and the other will turn you into a grumpy old man who has an office in the basement next to the dumpster.
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