Excavation progress

Excavation was due to be completed today, but due to the thunderstorms we had yesterday, the powder-dry clay has turned into a sticky, muddy mess! Way too wet for the excavators to work in. Hopefully we'll have some dry weather for the next few days and they can come back next week.

Looks like the retaining wall won't be finished in time for Christmas.

We've got Caller ID (CND)

I decided to take the plunge and ordered Caller ID on our home telephone this week. It costs $6/month which is not that cheap considering you just get a bit of extra data with each call, but I think with the savings we are making with using VoIP for virtually all of our phone calls it will be a useful addition.

Telstra have a deal that for the same price, you can actually choose two services, so as well Caller ID (or Calling Number Display as Telstra call it), I ordered a T1000C rental phone. This phone can display the Caller ID information, and also has the advantage of not requiring external power (unlike our existing cordless phone), so in the event of a power failure or flat battery we will still be able to make and receive calls.

The only configuration change I needed to make to my Sipura 3000 was to change the ring-tone back to a more conventional Australian ring. Without that, the telephone was losing the Caller ID info after the first ring.

ADO.NET 2.0 TableAdapters

I'm starting to get my head around some of the new features of .NET 2.0. One that I'm finding quite useful is the generated TableAdapters that are part of the new DataSet designer.

One situation I've just come across is the idea of having a "CREATED" and "MODIFIED" column for all tables to assist in auditing. By default, the code generated for the TableAdapter will try to insert and update these columns. But we want these columns to be only modified by triggers inside the database itself! So how to you modify the TableAdapter to read but not update these special columns?

It turns out you can right-click on the TableAdapter heading to modify it's properties, including the InsertCommand and UpdateCommand.

Another way you can extend the TableAdapter is through partial classes.