The Therapist I Shall Not Want

So the therapist I shall not want might propose an exercise. She would say, “You feel like you ‘lost’ some time? Record what you were working on for the last five hours to explain to yourself what you were doing.” The idea behind this is to render clear one’s perception of what the hell is going on. Shoot:

• I woke up this morning intending to solve the problem of using an ASMX page to write text files to disk (without granting write rights to the ASPNET account and without reading credentials inside the request—huh?).
• This intent led to seeing that a ‘data transformation assembly’ should be used to write these files to disk—whether it is called from an ASMX page remains to be seen.
• These data transformation assemblies (of the Songhay.Data.Transformations namespace) are meant to handle “legacy” SQL Server 2000 data in a similar manner that SQL Server 2005 handles .NET assemblies natively. The investment is worth it because SQL Server 2000 will not go away overnight in the real world of corporate shops.
• So there should be a manger for these assemblies—and, while I’m at it, it should manage SQL Server DTS Packages. Hey, Bryan! This could be the graphical front end to all that stuff you built in Songhay.Interop.Dts!
• Once the bullet above was shot, the quest began. The first hour or more was finding about this line of SQL code: EXEC sp_enum_dtspackages. Then there was another hour or so of trying to think of ways to get the data generated by this extended stored procedure to human eyes. This eventually led to something loosely based on the “beginner” stuff by Allan Mitchell, his “Enumerating DTS Packages using VB.Net,” at SQLDTS.com.
• Allan’s direction led me to define Songhay.Data.Components.Core. It’s “Core” because we use a ‘core’ database to store functions and tables shared by all other databases on the server—and this information about DTS packages is server-level, “core” data.
• My next shot is—

Ding! Time’s up. Therapy session over…

rasx()