Formatting of a DateTime type can sometimes be a tricky thing when working with C# and MS-SQL data. This is due to many different SQL collation settings and also datetime standards.

Since SQL has a DateTime standard in the format: 2010-01-20T00:00:00, everytime I deal with it in C# I use a String.Format method for conversion:

Example:

String.Format("{0:s}", Datetime.NOW);

With this method I am sure that MS-SQL will deal correctly with my DateTime.

I have run across this problem now for the second time. Now in application that I have built in Visual Studio. When I tried running my already working application that imports data from Excel into SQL Server database on a 64-bit machine the functionality of importing didn't go through anymore.

A workaround here that I found and works again as in SSIS is that you set it to run under 32-bit. So if you have this in Visual Studio 2008 in properties of project, build menu set Platform target to 32-bit (x86). Application will now be run under 32-bit and OLEDB provider will work fine.  I found no other solution yet of how to build it and run it in 64-bit environment.

A few days ago I needed to access and read the stream from files that I included in my Resources of Windows Forms project. On Microsoft support website http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319292 is a nice article about "How to embed and access resources by using Visual C#". Make sure you read all of it.

A process is straight forward using Assembly namespace, the trick that I encountered in my project was that in my debugger I kept on receiving a null value when reading any type of files to stream using:

// Reading stream from Aero Silver-Busy.ani Cursor
Stream my = this.GetType().Assembly.GetManifestResourceStream("demoProject.Resources.Aero Silver-Busy.ani");

Later after rereading the article I discovered that in Resources you need to click on a file and in Properties of a file set Build Action property to Embedded Resource. That is it and make sure you are refering to the right namespace and filename!

A new handy method that I just discovered in C# and I wish I knew it before is: String.IsNullOrEmpty(string value).

Whenever you are checking your string variables for null reference value you can just use this method instead of directly comparing your variable to null.  I use this quite often when I needed to pass to my parameters either a string value or a null.

Example: 

A method below will check if your string variable is null and therefore return null or a string value.


// Method that checks if string reference value is null
private string IsStringNull(string ValidString)
{  
   if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(ValidString) == true)
   { ValidString = null; }
   else 
   { ValidString = ValidString; } 
   return ValidString;
}

When building reports using Developer Express - XtraReportsSuite and passing the paramerers from stored procedures to the report, it seems that you need to use the sqlDataAdapter instead of TableAdapters to have the functionality of previewing reports working during designing time in Visual Studio.

By default the sqlDataAdapter is not included in VS Toolbox so you need to add it from the items in .NET Framework Components. After setting the properties of Select Command, don't forget to define also the parameters in Parameters collection properties and add it's testing values.

I found out on my laptop where I have installed locally SQL 2005 and VS 2008 that when implementing ToolTip in Windows Forms Application that the ToolTip component can be quite memory demanding. I have encountered this problem in an application where I have a datagridview bound to data in SQL. When adding a ToolTip feature and databound some information from SQL to ToolTip component the application started consuming a lot more CPU power and it was performing visibly slower.

The only solution I know until know is to try to avoid information bound to ToolTip. In my application I displayed the same information on click event in MessageBox.  

Saving Null values into DateTime Fileds in SQL Database is not as straight forward as it seems in C# and Windows Forms.  If you want to save a Null value into Database you have to write a custom code otherwise you encounter various interesting errors.