Being annoyed by creating a cursor script in SQL and having to define tons of variables manually I wondered if there was any tool to aid in this process. I quick google did not yield promising results. So spend the weekend conjuring up an application that eases the script creation by providing specialized generators to create scripts automatically from a given SELECT statement. It works pretty well and will be tested further in the next week until I’ll release it here under some opensource license.

Putting this app together thought me some new things about the settings and localization concepts of .NET 2.0. Two articles that got me introduced to the concept are the tutorial Localization in ASP .NET 2.0 on ondotnet.com and the detailed article
Localization Practices for .NET 2.0 on theserverside.net.

I googled for tools that create checksums for websites but I didn’t find much, so I started on creating a PHP application for that that purpose. My prototype has the following functionality:

• generating an xml list with checksums (SHA1) and file dates for a complete directory tree
• the xml list can be downloaded to be stored locally
• the xml checksum list can later be uploaded to be compared against the current state of the website
• a comparison is computed and display showing all modified, new and missing files with the information what (date, size, checksum) has been modified.

Here are two screenshots that show the current development version:

I will continue working on this tool and make it available as open source when it’s fairly stable.