Benford Does Stuff

Since finishing my previous data reporting project I’ve been setting up my workstation with the newest versions of various Microsoft tools that we have aquired in the new quarter. Though the install time was lengthy on my somewhat aging workstation (p4, 1 gb ram) at least everything was able to work without too much trouble. Running all of the installers over the network was priceless. Microsoft SQL client was not so easy to get working however. The main hurdle was that to install only the client, it was necessary to start the installer on the second disk, then choose a very specific set of components from there. I was able to get everything up and running on the second attempt.

After that  I started working with some ASP.NET guides, attempting some examples above and beyond “hello world”. ASP is pretty similar to php in many respects, probably because they serve approximately the same role. With the newest version of the .NET framework (3.5 at time of writing) there have been new features added to reduce the overhead in correctly assembling an SQL query. I remember manually constructing an SQL query in php and the associated large number of syntax errors, so I fully appreciate the improvement here.

My next task will be to get ASP communitcating with a test database elsewhere on the network as a proof of concept for a future project.