...there is no god.... :((

Hail our new rat cyborg overlords... and so it begun...

...good one though ;) there actually exists such a seperator iuhasdfhu,gvsd.fgzdfjhb (sorry, I just had to smash my head into the keyboard... it reliefs the pain)

I like the "thermiting" idea of you... And this is just a small snippet of the project... it's like a "Coding Horror" blog that came to live... As a grown up man I am not ashamed of my tears :)

After my well deserved vacation I returned to work. Beeing happy I received a task to modify a DotNetNuke module, made by some externals from a country far far away. Happyness didn't last long when I came along a SearchEngine class:

public const string SELECT = "SELECT";
public const string DISTINCT = "DISTINCT";
public const string FROM = "FROM";
public const string WHERE = "WHERE";
public const string HAVING = "HAVING";
public const string AND = "AND";
public const string OR = "OR";
public const string IN = "IN";
public const string ON = "ON";
public const string AS = "AS";
public const string GROUP_BY = "GROUP BY";
public const string ORDER_BY = "ORDER BY";
public const string DESC = "DESC";
public const string ASC = "ASC";

this continues for about 1500 lines of code declaring every possible table/column etc I could think of. 90% of the consts aren't even in use... and it all ends up in statements like that:

sqlString.AppendFormat("{0} {1} {2}.{3},{2}.{4},{2}.{5},{2}.{6},{2}.{7},{2}.{8},{2}.{9},{2}.{10},{2}.{11},{12} {13} {14} {15} {2} {16} {17} = @{17}",new string[]
{
SqlConsts.SELECT,
SqlConsts.DISTINCT,
SqlConsts.TBL1,
SqlConsts.OBJECT_NO,
SqlConsts.OBJECT_ID,
SqlConsts.COUNTRY,
SqlConsts.REGION,
SqlConsts.SUBREGION,
SqlConsts.TOURAREA,
SqlConsts.LATITUDE,
SqlConsts.LONGITUDE,
SqlConsts.CITY,
SqlConsts.COUNT_ANY,
SqlConsts.AS,
SqlConsts.UNIT_COUNT,
SqlConsts.FROM,
SqlConsts.WHERE,
SqlConsts.YEAR
});

...am I missing something or is this an acceptable way of solving database related tasks? Can you spot a reason for this? If so, please make my happiness return... somehow... please... Happy new year Andy

Hey Marc, been there... I figured out girlfriend hast to be installed first. The problem here is to find a "not so buggy" version with a pretty UI. After that an old-fashioned SMS like "Go to the kittchen and make me a sandwich" is sufficient to "get her started" :)

Kai Diekmann (l.) und Nikolaus Blome (r). They are editorial journalists from the "Bild" newspaper (german) Here's the complete article: http://www.bild.de/politik/inland/europaeische-zentralbank/entscheidet-heute-ueber-weitere-milliardenhilfen-25445194.bild.html[^]

Casualties of war Guns'n Roses Civil War...

Hi Bernhard, thanks a lot for sharing your experiences., it was very helpful. Good you mentioned the threadding issue, that completely fell under the table :) In my application the language is set when logging in by selecting the required language. The language is then stored as readonly in a static class, pretty much the same as using a config file. I also haven't heared about the translation offices you have mentioned. While I am pretty sure our management will use internal resources for translating this is still a good thing to know :) Thanks a lot and have a great day, Viele Grüße aus München Andy

Hi Eddy Vluggen, thanks a lot for the clarification. There is just one thing that I maybe missexplained:

Eddy Vluggen wrote:

They don't need to know. Windows knows what culture the user is using, and both can "ask" Windows.

This is totally correct, but I was actually referring to the language the customer wants the application to run with. I do not know wether they want a dutch, german, english or whatever language, neither does the plugin developer know, so it has to be possible to adjust it after deployment. Anyway, this doen't make an actual difference :)

Eddy Vluggen wrote:

You could opt to put the shared resources in an external library, and share that among the projects. That way you'd need to localize the resources only once.

I like this idea and honestly I already use such an approach for sharing image resources over multiple projects. Thanks Eddy for sharing your ideas/knowledge, I appreciate this very much!!! Have a great day and best regards Andy

Thanks a lot for your honest contribution, it is very much appreciated. I understand your points so far and will take them into concern. The main reason for thinking about this problem in the first place is the plugin-mechanism. The MainFrame does not know what languages it should support, neither does the developer of the plugin... Normally a bunch of dlls is copied into the appropriate directory to make the MainFrame pick it up. So I thought that translation should be up to the MainFrame which leads me into the belive that a custom, database related tool should do the job. So if I have five plugins all using a save button, I would need 5 translations for exactly the same thing... thas where my concern about dulicate translations came into play... Also thanks a lot for mentioning the VS-IDE approach, I'll go digg into this :) cheers Andy

You are wellcome... thanks for pointing it out ;) cheers from Munich Andy

Hi all, again I wan't to come up with a rather theoretical question. This time regarding localization of a winforms project. I read some articles on the topic and checked whats available on the market but I am not really satisfied with what I have found. My project consists of a main-frame app that loads plugins (mainly Forms), displays them and handles the communication of the plugins. I found several tools that handle resource file localization. While I think that this will work in normal winform apps I am pretty sure that this will result in duplicate translations (Imagine a Save-Button label - this will be needed in nearly every plugin so the developer of a plugin will have to deal with this in the plugin on his/her own). I also found database related solutions that I like a little better than the resource file solution. Unfortunately those solutions look pretty "fat" and will maybe trouble me with their licences. So I thought about it a little while and here is what I came up with: I thought about having a central class that should handle the translations for me globally. The corresponding DLL will be given to the plugin developers too, so they can implement it within their plugins. I want to send every string through a static function that accepts the string and reads the UICulture in the background. It should then check if the string is already in the database, translates and returns if so, or creates "placeholder entries" and retruns the default value (the passed string). The Placeholder entries can then be read by a little app that visualizes the missing translations, allowing a transslator to go through them and translate whats missing. This way the "save" translation will not be duplicated and administered in a single place. Additionally the mainFrame can extend it's languages without having to deal with the plugin resources. The drawback for now is that the plugin developer will not be able (so far) to submit his/her translations together with the plugin, but I do not think that this is really necessary. I also haven't thought heavily about images, but there will be a way. So what do you think? Is this a screwed up idea? What tools do you use for such requirements? Is it even necessary to think about duplicate translations? I am looking foreward to hear your thoughts about this, any input is kindly appreciated cheers and have a great day Andy

you wasted my day ;) ...nothing will done until I watched it completely ;)

This is actually pretty cool, have 5

Honestly, I came across your sig several times already, must have stayed im my head somehow ;)

Thanks for the links It is very much appreciated :)

I agree that there is always a best choice for each project. But isn't that a highly personal question? If I have to find the best choice for a project to start I might come up with a different solution than another one who has different preferences/points of view. I read an article a while back (sorry, I can not remeber the source) about the "ego" of software developers and how they sometimes choose a complex solution over a simple one just to satisfy their ego? Personally I can not totally resent that statement. I feel more joy in what I am doing when I can create something interesting than just by doing the job as fast and as cheap as possible. Of course, egos should not make you choose the wrong solution, but don't you somethimes sit back and just feel good about an elegant, more complex solution than a dirty hack? Maybe it's the experience that makes someone choose the right solution over the "personally enjoyable" solution... or time pressure ;)

Sounds interesting, I gonna take the walk on the wildside this afternoon ;)

You are totally right. In the past I never had any discussions about the tools I use. But I also met project managers that did. One is still in my mind who had to maintain a 15 years old system that was taken from DBase to VisualBasic, to C#/SQL. He had to throw away so much code and wanted to know about how we were continuing the project and what kind of paradigm we will use. I had quite a lot of discussions related to my preferred OO approach and even after proving him wrong on so many things (at least he never gives up - and he's a good one after all) I still get sentences like the following: "Due to the fact that you created this part so nicely using your loved OO approach (english ist not my mother-language, but this sentence sounds sarcastically in real life) it will not be a big problem to extend/change/etc. whatever I come up with right now..." We were able to get rid of a lot of "old" problems (no objects at all, hundreds of VB6 forms) and I belive he is just unhappy that the things that have been already in place weren't really reusable at all. Ok, the new parts are reusable/extendable/MEF-ified and whatever and will be for another while, until the next smartass shows up with new ideas/toolsets. I am looking forward for this person to show up (there is always a lot to learn) ;)