TechShorts

I was working on a WinForm app that connected to a MS Access database. Yeah, Access sucks but I didn't have a choice in the matter. The app itself is used to import a bunch of CSV files into the Access database. It is more of a utility program and it has going through several variations, from being a simple hand driven command line tool to being GUI driven. The command line version was all hand controlled. I had to go in and update configuration files to point to the CSV files and the MDB database. That got old fast so I decided to make a GUI version that would allow me to pick the MDB file and each of the CSV files to import. Picking and using the CSV files was easy, it was changing the connection string for the MDB that proved to be the hardest. I am using strongly typed datasets in VS2005. If you have ever worked with them you find out soon that the connection string gets saved with the project in the app.config file, even if it is a seperate DAL dll project. My guess is