Comments by OriginalGriff (Top 200 by date)

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with - we get no other context for your project.
Imagine this: you go for a drive in the country, but you have a problem with the car. You call the garage, say "it broke" and turn off your phone. How long will you be waiting before the garage arrives with the right bits and tools to fix the car given they don't know what make or model it is, who you are, what happened when it all went wrong, or even where you are?

That's what you've done here. So stop typing as little as possible and try explaining things to people who have no way to access your project!

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

And?
What does it do that you didn't expect, or not do that you did?
What have you tried to do to find out why?
Are there any error messages, and if so, where and when? What did you do to make them happen?

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

Use the SQL COUNT function: SELECT COUNT(Id) FROM MyTable WHERE ...
You can then call ExecuteScalar to return a single value which is the number of matching rows.

It was a generalisation - it's nearly universally considered a bad idea to stick too much stuff on the stack! :D

So use a link shrinker: send a short link like "mydomain.com/ABCDEFGH" and use a "page not found" handler to convert that (via a DB) to an actual page then redirect to that.

@DaveKerr

Can you have a look at this one? It's about a project of yours on Github

You should have got your tongue to hold itself ...

It's a GPT Troll - he probably has no idea what you are talking about since he can only copy'n'paste crap.

He'll have no account soon.

"FYP":"Final Year Project"
Homework on steroids. :D

Don't add comments or clarifications as a solution - that removes your question from the "unanswered" queue which reduces the chances that people will look at it.
Instead, edit your original question to add information by hovering over your question and clicking the "improve question" link, or by using the "Reply" button to reply to a specific comment, or by clicking the "Have a Question or Comment?" button.

I've moved this solution into your question body - please check and improve it as necessary and if you want I'll delete this solution - just reply to me asking for that and I'll do it.

That you will have to take up with them - way too many variables! :laugh:

Rolled back: the question and answer become meaningless and unhelpful if you remove all the detail!

You're welcome!

After 350 questions, you'd have hoped he would have worked something for himself by now ... :sigh:

And?
What does it do that you didn't expect, or not do that you did?
What have you tried to do to find out why?
Are there any error messages, and if so, where and when? What did you do to make them happen?

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

You're welcome!

Yes, but you have to remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with - we get no other context for your project.

While I applaud your urge to help people, it's a good idea to stick to new questions, rather than 13 year old ones. After that amount of time, it's unlikely that the original poster is at all interested in the problem any more!
Answering old questions can be seen as rep-point hunting, which is a form of site abuse. The more trigger happy amongst us will start the process of banning you from the site if you aren't careful. Stick to new questions and you'll be fine.

What does the debugger show you is happening?

And?
What does it do that you didn't expect, or not do that you did?
What have you tried to do to find out why?
Are there any error messages, and if so, where and when? What did you do to make them happen?

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

There is no "one answer" that guarantees profits.
If you are selling 10 copies at $200,000 each, then buy damn good protection - the customer will understand and even expect it, but it's unlikely to be heavily pirated anyway.
If you are selling 10 copies at $20 each, then it's not worth protecting - it'll cost more to add and support it than you'll make.
And it'll depend on who your customers are: think about software that gets pirated and if your software fits into that group.

Somewhere in the middle is a "happy medium" where it's worth protecting, but where that is depends on your specific circumstances - and the heavier the protection you add, the more likely it gets to be cracked as a challenge, and the more your support costs grow when the protection gets too "heavy handed" with legitimate customers.

In my experience, it's almost never worth your time to add "home grown" protection to software!

Think about your number projections, and work out "best case" and "worst case" values. Then look at the worst case - because if you get the the best case the likelihood of of cracking goes up, not down but you've probably got the revenue stream to support paying for "proper" protection. How much is your time worth to you? How much of it can you afford to expend before (in the worst case) you start to make a loss? How many hours is that? How many hours have you invested in "protection" so far? How much money is left in the budget for that?

Remember, if it gets to selling significantly above worse case you can add protection as part of a major "free upgrade" - but if you add poor protection it'll impact sales and drive your support costs up as well as damaging reputation.

I'm guessing here, but I'd say you have probably gone out of budget already!


Is it really that obvious that I used to run companies? :laugh:

AI can write code!

Not working code, no. But even students can write non-working code and they are hardly intelligent most of the time ... :D

As CPallini says, that's just a code dump.

And we have no idea what it is supposed to do, much less helps us with any information, such as:
1) What does it do that you didn't expect, or not do that you did?
2) What have you tried to do to find out why?
3) Are there any error messages, and if so, where and when? What did you do to make them happen?
4) If you have "completed the entire code" then what is the problem? Just hand it in for grading!

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

Answer updated

This is not a solution - post it using the "Have a Question or Comment?" button below the post you want to reply to and it sends an email to the user. Posting it as a separate solution doesn't do that - it would only communicate with the user who posted the question - i.e. you!

Just like this reply emailed you!

If you want me to delete this when you have copy'n'pasted it as a reply / comment to Richard, just let me know in a reply to this and I'll sort it out for you.

While I applaud your urge to help people, it's a good idea to stick to new questions, rather than 12 year old ones. After that amount of time, it's unlikely that the original poster is at all interested in the problem any more!
Answering old questions can be seen as rep-point hunting, which is a form of site abuse. The more trigger happy amongst us will start the process of banning you from the site if you aren't careful. Stick to new questions and you'll be fine.

I'd rather you didn't.

Is there any particular reason why you think that would help you in any significant way?

I'm not sure you can do that, but if you can it'll rely on calling the GetForegroundWindow function (winuser.h) - Win32 apps | Microsoft Learn[^]
But ... that may just return the focussed window in the current app, not the whole system (security and all that).

But as Dave says, there is no "focus order" list in Windows so if your target app is minimised or switched away from, you can't find out which app it was at all.

Yes but you still have to check!

Yes, but if it's invisible, it can't be the current cell because the user can't access it!

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with - we get no other context for your project.
Imagine this: you go for a drive in the country, but you have a problem with the car. You call the garage, say "it broke" and turn off your phone. How long will you be waiting before the garage arrives with the right bits and tools to fix the car given they don't know what make or model it is, who you are, what happened when it all went wrong, or even where you are?

That's what you've done here. So stop typing as little as possible and try explaining things to people who have no way to access your project!

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with - we get no other context for your project.
Imagine this: you go for a drive in the country, but you have a problem with the car. You call the garage, say "it broke" and turn off your phone. How long will you be waiting before the garage arrives with the right bits and tools to fix the car given they don't know what make or model it is, who you are, what happened when it all went wrong, or even where you are?

That's what you've done here. So stop typing as little as possible and try explaining things to people who have no way to access your project!

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

No, read what I said again: "this is always the current instance of the current class" If you are executing class code, the system sets this for you. null is very different and indicates "no instance here at all".

No, no - if he provides the address I'll email the tutor, no problem! This is a Moral issue, after all ... :D

Back in the 80's, my PM ordered his new company Vauxhall Cavalier in "Arctic Fox" because it sounded cool. Or "Pink" as everyone else called it when it arrived ... :laugh:

"Shiny Grey" :D

And?
What does it do that you didn't expect, or not do that you did?
What have you tried to do to find out why?
Are there any error messages, and if so, where and when? What did you do to make them happen?

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

And?
What does it do that you didn't expect, or not do that you did?
What have you tried to do to find out why?
Are there any error messages, and if so, where and when? What did you do to make them happen?

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

I've never liked XML: it's just a poor design IMO.
JSON isn't bad - it's really usable if you need to work between systems / languages but it's limited quite a bit by it's "human readable" side.

What I'd like is a binary format with decent editors / class creators that is cross platform without the weight of a "proper" DB, but ... :sigh:

Don't. Why do people always assume "encryption automatically makes things secure"?
Have a look here: Password Storage: How to do it.[^]
It talks about passwords, but it's exactly the same problem.

As a word of advice, don't spend too long "securing" your product: unless you know what you are doing, your "protection" scheme is going to either piss off legitimate users (when it fails to detect it's legitimacy) or be simple to crack for someone who does know. Adobe had a whole department dedicated to securing Photoshop - and each time they released a new version a cracked version would appear the same day ... give some people enough of a challenge and you will not believe how much effort they will put into breaking it!

You're welcome!

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with - we get no other context for your project.
Imagine this: you go for a drive in the country, but you have a problem with the car. You call the garage, say "it broke" and turn off your phone. How long will you be waiting before the garage arrives with the right bits and tools to fix the car given they don't know what make or model it is, who you are, what happened when it all went wrong, or even where you are?

That's what you've done here. So stop typing as little as possible and try explaining things to people who have no way to access your project!

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

This one is a spammer - expect a spam response in the near future (assuming he survives - he's on 8 now).

As I said, "you need to check for punctuation and decide what to do when presented with an "a" or "A""

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with - we get no other context for your project.
Imagine this: you go for a drive in the country, but you have a problem with the car. You call the garage, say "it broke" and turn off your phone. How long will you be waiting before the garage arrives with the right bits and tools to fix the car given they don't know what make or model it is, who you are, what happened when it all went wrong, or even where you are?

That's what you've done here. So stop typing as little as possible and try explaining things to people who have no way to access your project! We don't even that language or software the macro needs to run under!

And please, this is an English language site, and we can only accept and answer questions in that language.
I have run this through Google Translate to produce a probably-good version, but you should check it and make sure it does say what you are actually asking.

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

Seriously, don't do it like that. Always use parameterised queries: google "bobby tables" and don't assume it's just a joke.

Secondly, you know that isn't what your code looks like: that's a fixed string, which for an UPDATE query is very unlikely to be useful. You need to check if that is exactly what you are using - because a tiny difference in an SQL command can have a big effect. FOr example, is the WHERE clause actually using a leading space? Does the DB also include that leading space?

Thirdly, how are you checking that your DB is not being updated? If that was your actual query, then every matching field will be changed, so I suspect that either that code isn't getting executed, the DB doesn't contain what you assume it does, or that query isn't what you actually used.

We can't check any of that: we have no access to yoru code while running, or to your DB. So use the debugger, and look at exactly what is going on!

Why edit out the actual query? That's the bit that does the work, and it's pretty much vital to determining if there is a problem ...

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with - we get no other context for your project.
Imagine this: you go for a drive in the country, but you have a problem with the car. You call the garage, say "it broke" and turn off your phone. How long will you be waiting before the garage arrives with the right bits and tools to fix the car given they don't know what make or model it is, who you are, what happened when it all went wrong, or even where you are?

That's what you've done here. So stop typing as little as possible and try explaining things to people who have no way to access your project! Give us relevant code fragments, tell us what you tried and what happened when you did.

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

While I applaud your urge to help people, it's a good idea to stick to new questions, rather than 11 year old ones. After that amount of time, it's unlikely that the original poster is at all interested in the problem any more!
Answering old questions can be seen as rep-point hunting, which is a form of site abuse. The more trigger happy amongst us will start the process of banning you from the site if you aren't careful. Stick to new questions and you'll be fine.

As I said: start with Google. You can branch out from there.

Ah, that makes sense - I normally handle thread safety myself when I need it, so it's not been a problem.
Yes, .Net images are handled by unmanaged code in GDIPlus.dll (which is why GetPixel and SetPixel are so spectacularly inefficient - P/Invoke for every call :shudder:)
You can use LockBits to get an IntPtr then use that to get a byte[] (or a pointer if you fancy going unsafe) and use multiple threads on that, subject to the usual caveats and cautions!

Not a problem - happens all the time.
Where did you get the "changing bitmaps causes problems" idea from? It's a perfectly valid thing to do, and I've done it for over a decade without having to create a new bitmap. The only time I can see it might cause a problem is if it's created from a file (via Bitmap.FromFile / Image.FromFile) because they lock the original file until the Image is Disposed.
I've never had a problem editing a Bitmap (though I don't normally use GetPixel / SetPixel as they are phenomenally inefficient) so I'm wondering if I've just been lucky all these years! :laugh:

Yes ... but ...
It needs a valid installation of Excel (and probably the whole of Office) on the web server, and that not normal, and unlikely to be popular with your website admin - each instance of Excel take a fair amount of system resources and you don't know how many instances the server will need to run at any time. Since it's a website that could be a considerable load on the web server and slug everything else.

A better solution would be to rewrite your scripts to do the job in PHP itself (since it runs on your server anyway) - there is an Excel library for PHP so it shouldn't be a major task.
How to Create and Modify Excel Spreadsheets in PHP[^]

So check the size of the memory block you allocated. Remember that the bitmap is likely to need four bytes per pixel!

Have a look at how the .NET PrintDocument class is used: it handles pages in a pretty simple way.
Google will find you tutorials on how to work with it which will help you understand what you need to do in your code.

What part of it is difficult for you?
You wrote the rest of the code, so it should be pretty obvious ...

You're welcome - we all had to start from the beginning once! :D

And?
What does it do that you didn't expect, or not do that you did?
What have you tried to do to find out why?
Are there any error messages, and if so, where and when? What did you do to make them happen?

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

Have you checked that the order of the #include lines are the same in both projects?

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with - we get no other context for your project.
Imagine this: you go for a drive in the country, but you have a problem with the car. You call the garage, say "it broke" and turn off your phone. How long will you be waiting before the garage arrives with the right bits and tools to fix the car given they don't know what make or model it is, who you are, what happened when it all went wrong, or even where you are?

That's what you've done here. So stop typing as little as possible and try explaining things to people who have no way to access your project!

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with - we get no other context for your project.
Imagine this: you go for a drive in the country, but you have a problem with the car. You call the garage, say "it broke" and turn off your phone. How long will you be waiting before the garage arrives with the right bits and tools to fix the car given they don't know what make or model it is, who you are, what happened when it all went wrong, or even where you are?

That's what you've done here. So stop typing as little as possible and try explaining things to people who have no way to access your project!

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

I have a full size desktop keyboard, and the ESC button is 8cm from the little finger on my left hand. If I use my Surface, it's about 5cm away.
So either you are a one-finger typist who thinks he types fast, or your keyboard is the size of a desk ...

If you want to type fast, do a typing course: it will save you immense amounts of time in the long run (and place your fingers where they can reach all the keys conveniently).

Probably: that's the way I'd do it, and SRT files are trivial compared with the video file size!

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with - we get no other context for your project.
Imagine this: you go for a drive in the country, but you have a problem with the car. You call the garage, say "it broke" and turn off your phone. How long will you be waiting before the garage arrives with the right bits and tools to fix the car given they don't know what make or model it is, who you are, what happened when it all went wrong, or even where you are?

That's what you've done here. So stop typing as little as possible and try explaining things to people who have no way to access your project!

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

:D

"It doesn't work" is probably the most useless problem report we get - and we get it a lot. It tells us nothing about what is happening, or when it happens.
So tell us what it is doing that you didn't expect, or not doing that you did.
Tell us what you did to get it to happen.
Tell us any error messages.
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

"It doesn't work" is probably the most useless problem report we get - and we get it a lot. It tells us nothing about what is happening, or when it happens.
So tell us what it is doing that you didn't expect, or not doing that you did.
Tell us what you did to get it to happen.
Tell us any error messages.
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

This is not a solution, so this is the wrong place to post it.
Even if it were, posting a solution to a 14 year old question is going to look like rep point hunting to most people, and we count that as a form of site abuse. The more tigger happy among us will start the ban hammer swinging, so I'll delete this for you to prevent that.
Post questions in the right place: https://www.codeproject.com/Questions/ask.aspx
And stick to fresh questions for solutions!

"It's not working" is one of the most useless problem descriptions we get: it tells us absolutely nothing about the problem. We don't know if you get an error message, or the wrong data, or even that that code compiles successfully!
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.
So tell us what happens when you run that code, what you expected to happen, how you checked what happened. Tell us what the debugger showed you was going on. Show us you modified code. Help us to help you!

This is your 60th question on this site, and it's completely meaningless.

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with - we get no other context for your project.
Imagine this: you go for a drive in the country, but you have a problem with the car. You call the garage, say "it broke" and turn off your phone. How long will you be waiting before the garage arrives with the right bits and tools to fix the car given they don't know what make or model it is, who you are, what happened when it all went wrong, or even where you are?

That's what you've done here. So stop typing as little as possible and try explaining things to people who have no way to access your project!

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

Erm ... that doesn't do what you originally asked for: it adds two text strings.
So if the file contained:

0x00000;
0x10000;
0x11000;

The resulting file contains this:

0x00000 + 0x617A0;
0x10000 + 0x617A0;
0x11000 + 0x617A0;

From your original description I expected you wanted this:

0x617A0;
0x717A0;
0x727A0;

Either you need to be a lot more specific when you ask a question, or your solution doesn't work.

Dave is right - think about it.
If your production server is having memory pressure problems then that's slowing the production server - and depending on what it's serving to whom, that's costing the company money. If it's an internal server that costs worker time and that's expensive. If it's customer facing data (like an online shop for example) then it can lose you significant amounts of money as they bugger off elsewhere and you lose the sale.
So ask yourself this: if your software test blocks the server how much does it cost the company, and who will get blamed when it happens? Because it does; it will! That's what testing is for - to ensure those problems never get near the production server!

🤣
If I could upvote that, I would!

Excellent!

That's because you are saving the lastSurfaceType *after* you move not before, or not restoring it before you save the new location - without your code I can't tell!

Use the debugger to look at both locations, and follow exactly what you code is doing while it runs.

And?
What does it do that you didn't expect, or not do that you did?
What have you tried to do to find out why?
Are there any error messages, and if so, where and when? What did you do to make them happen?

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

And?
What does it do that you didn't expect, or not do that you did?
What have you tried to do to find out why?
Are there any error messages, and if so, where and when? What did you do to make them happen?

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

Desk*bang*Desk*bang*Desk*bang* ...

So, put a breakpoint on the first of those lines of code and when the debugger hits it look at the give and it's variables to find out what data you are processing. Just throwing an error message at us isn't "using the debugger" - it's "running the code and hoping it doesn't fail this time." It will, until you - and it has to be you, we don't have your data - actually look at the data and find out what is happening.

So what does the debugger show you is in the grid when the error occurs?

I didn't see the other question, but I'd guess you are right.
This on it's own isn't spam though, so I answered.

Don't post this as a "solution": use the "Have a question or comment?" button below the original query instead.
Posting it as a solution - particularly to an old question like this (8 years and you think he might still remember?) - can look like rep point hunting which we class as site abuse and will get you banned if a trigger happy member sees it ...

1) No, QString result is a variable in your app. The process you started has no access to it - the redirection you add sends it to a file which just happens to have the same name; the file is nothing to do with your app!
2) Because | is OS-speak for "Pipe output of the app on the left to the app on the right" - it doesn't display anything because it fed the output to an app instead of the console.

And?
What does it do that you didn't expect, or not do that you did?
What have you tried to do to find out why?
Are there any error messages, and if so, where and when? What did you do to make them happen?

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

So where did you get the idea that the project even exists? We have no idea what you are talking about other than exactly what you type - we get no other context!

And?
What does it do that you didn't expect, or not do that you did?
What have you tried to do to find out why?
Are there any error messages, and if so, where and when? What did you do to make them happen?

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do or what you have a problem with - so we have no idea what help you need!

Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

This is the wrong place to ask this: it is unrelated to the original query, which was solved 9 years ago and is very unlikely to be visited again by anyone who might answer it.
I only saw it because your post was sent to moderation!

Ask it again in the right place and you will get an answer: https://www.codeproject.com/Questions/ask.aspx[^]
But ... a solution needs more information from you anyway: we have no idea what language you are using which will affect the code needed for a solution so tell us that, tell us what framework your code will run under, tell us what you have tried so we don't duplicate your work!

This is an English language site, and we can only accept and answer questions in that language.
I have run this through Google Translate to produce a probably-good version, but you should check it and make sure it does say what you are actually asking.

While I applaud your urge to help people, it's a good idea to stick to new questions, rather than 8 year old ones. After that amount of time, it's unlikely that the original poster is at all interested in the problem any more!
Answering old questions can be seen as rep-point hunting, which is a form of site abuse. The more trigger happy amongst us will start the process of banning you from the site if you aren't careful. Stick to new questions and you'll be fine.

You're welcome!

How do you know that?
What have you done to prove that, or did you just assume a client side error because it was the browser that reported it?

Think about it: if the Server side returned "Hello World!" what would the browser do?

Just so you know for next time: When you paste a "raw link" like:
https://imgur.com/a/ycvdU1g
The system adds the required tags (and grabs the remote site page title for you as well):
<a href="https://imgur.com/a/ycvdU1g">Imgur: The magic of the Internet</a>[<a href="https://imgur.com/a/ycvdU1g" target="_blank" title="New Window">^</a>]

I fixed the link for you, but it's a load easier and better to just copy'n'paste the error text instead of linking - many members won't follow links because we never know what is at the other end (and we've had some unpleasant images posted in the past).

I think you probably want to start by showing sample input and expected output: we don't have access to your DB, so we can't tell what you are actually trying to do.

Make samples as short and simple as possible (while still showing the problem) to make it easier for reader to work out what you are trying to do. And try to explain where the results you want come from!

Just saying "I get the error but I think I want it on the last join anyway, not the second" doesn;t help us much.

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

"Never too late for an answer?"
Well ... it depends.

While I applaud your urge to help people, it's a good idea to stick to new questions, rather than 12 year old ones. After that amount of time, it's unlikely that the original poster is at all interested in the problem any more!
Answering old questions can be seen as rep-point hunting, which is a form of site abuse. The more trigger happy amongst us will start the process of banning you from the site if you aren't careful. Stick to new questions and you'll be fine. Welcome aboard!

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with - we get no other context for your project.
Imagine this: you go for a drive in the country, but you have a problem with the car. You call the garage, say "it broke" and turn off your phone. How long will you be waiting before the garage arrives with the right bits and tools to fix the car given they don't know what make or model it is, who you are, what happened when it all went wrong, or even where you are?

That's what you've done here. So stop typing as little as possible and try explaining things to people who have no way to access your project!

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

Nope!

Stuck with WinForms. Still works for me.

I absolutely agree with you: I first discovered this when I considered moving from WinForms to WPF - but the designer tools in VS were so piss-poor that I just gave up and stuck to WinForms.
Hand coding XAML after the drag'n'drop excellence I was used to? Why? It just made WPF feel "unfinished" and turned me right off the whole idea. It's the 21st Century: we shouldn't have to put up with crap like that.

You're welcome!

You can download various versions free from MS - google for "Visual Studio Community Edition Microsoft.com older versions" if you don't want the latest.

:laugh:
You do realize that that one is 9 years out of date?

What's wrong with a fairly recent one? Or ... are you still running WIndows 7? :D

Yes, it is - so much so that I wouldn't want to reinvent the wheel and even try to duplicate it.
Instead, I'd upgrade to a much more modern version of VB that includes it: it's free for single / home / small developers after all ...

It's not the software on your computer that controls it, it's the email service provider - the company that hosts the "domain" part of the email address you are sending from: "username@domain".
So if you use MS email domains such as hotmail.com, or outlook.com you are working under the restrictions of their T&Cs. If your activity appears to breach those conditions they can block or terminate your service. Read the T&C's you agreed to when you signed up again, they are normally very specific.
For example, outlook.com has a restriction of 300 outgoing emails per day. Send 301, and you are in trouble ...

If you want to send mass emails, you need to look - and pay - for a suitable service. And do note that many of those go straight to the junk folder is any form of internet security is involved on the client machine, or the client email service provider. For example, any emails from any russian domain go straight to WOM on my computer!

It's almost as if free email providers don't like hosting spammers and phishers, isn't it? :D

No, read what I said again ...

Except to send a "validation required" email and see if they click it.
Even then, in five minutes time it may not exist again ... :D

They don't block your account because that's their corporate policy: they cater for mass marketing
(including spam) accounts.
The decision to block is at the email service provider end, not the "generate bulk emails" software end.

You're welcome!

Repeating what you said last time is not explaining in more detail ...

"It doesn't work" is probably the most useless problem report we get - and we get it a lot. It tells us nothing about what is happening, or when it happens.
So tell us what it is doing that you didn't expect, or not doing that you did.
Tell us what you did to get it to happen.
Tell us any error messages.
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

That makes no sense to me: you need to explain in more detail.

Good spot! Have my upvote. :thumbsup:

You're welcome!

So after I gave you the advice, you spent a maximum of 12 minutes (and probably considerably less than that given that your email system probably only refreshes every 15 minutes) "trying to find the bug" and then gave up?
Debugging is part of the tool set: if you don't learn how to do it with trivial examples of code you are going to be completely stuck when you get up into the "multiple megabytes of source" apps that are the real world!

So tell me what the debugger showed you: where did your expectations differ from reality?

Why are you telling me this, not him?
And given that he hasn't even logged in since November 2022 it's unlikely he's interested any more (he failed his course, maybe?)

I don't think your words were misunderstood here: it's just that giving (even poor quality) code solutions to homework causes problems for the student later. Software courses are structured so you start simple and get more complex - so if you copy'n'paste homework you never develop the skill to write code yourself. Which is a real problem in the final exam when you can't get someone else to write it for you ...

That's got to be a coincidence - MS don't fix bugs! :laugh:

Yeah, I just like getting them to type more ... :laugh:

You're welcome!

MS Support can be damn good when they want to.

Yes. :D

And?
What does it do that you didn't expect, or not do that you did?
What have you tried to do to find out why?
Are there any error messages, and if so, where and when? What did you do to make them happen?

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are having problems with.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

Yep. Silly name, comes from Linux, I think.

You're welcome! Didn't realize it was you - I don't look at usernames much to avoid unconscious bias.

You're welcome!

Oh come on! You know how to create a class level counter:

private int myCounter = 0;

And you know how to increment it:

myCounter++;

So what's the problem?

Please don't tell me you are just using random internet code without trying to understand it first ...

Don't avoid malloc and free - they move your array to the heap instead of being on the stack, which means you can use a much, much bigger array - the total stack size is generally 1Mb (though I've seen 256 byte stacks in some compilers) while the heap is basically the size of your machines ram (or larger, but that means paging to HDD which is slow).

Because an array is syntactic sugar the compiler writer has decided that a pointer to an array is not a pointer to a pointer an integer, even though the C specification states that the name of an array (in this case b) is a pointer to the first element in the array it also states that the name of an array is NOT an lvalue so you can't use it in operations that require one:

    int b[5] = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4};
    b++;
    printf("%u\n", *b);

Will give you an error to that effect, and the address of operator explicitly requires an lvalue to avoid things like this compiling:

int* a = &(2 + 3);

The compiler writer is trying to be friendly and helpful by explicitly stating the problem instead of a generic lvalue error message.

You are interested in "how many tasks have completed so far?" not "what's the number of the task that just completed?" because you use that to set your ProgressBar value. So you want a variable that increments each time a task completes, not when you create them as some will take longer than others depending on how much data they are processing.
So create a class level counter, zero it before your loop, and increment it in the Progress handler method.

Sorry, but if you are going to use multithreading, you need to understand what is going on: it's not a "Magic Bullet" you can lob in without a good amount of thought: it's very, very easy to slow the whole task down instead of speeding it up if you aren't careful!

Of course it won't: each loop creates it's own Task which "picks up" it's value of currentTask when the handler code gets to execute - not the value of the variable when the Task.Run call was made. And since they all run independently the value of the progress bar is going to be set to "full" by the first task to complete it's job - and stay there for all the others.

Move the counter to the progress reporting code and it'll start to work.

"Divide"? What have you done that makes you think you deserve any of the money?

And more, I suspect - the first code looks like a stack based virtual machine (and his previous questions referred to one) so all operations that require two operands will require 3 * 16 bit accesses: two POPs and a PUSH for the results.

Yeah, I noticed the similarity but thought I'd give it the benefit of the doubt this time.
If he ignores us ... :D

While I applaud your urge to help people, it's a good idea to stick to new questions, rather than 10 year old ones. After that amount of time, it's unlikely that the original poster is at all interested in the problem any more!
Answering old questions can be seen as rep-point hunting, which is a form of site abuse. The more trigger happy amongst us will start the process of banning you from the site if you aren't careful. Stick to new questions and you'll be fine.

The problems with that are many: I don't have your (or indeed any) flowcharting software, and I don't have your assignment are but two biggies here.
But the biggest biggie is that this is your assignment: it's supposed to get you to learn what you are doing; how to use the information your teacher has imparted - and to start building your skill in processing that information to solve problems. Handing you a flowchart doesn't do that, any more than watching the Tour de France teaches you how to ride a bicycle - skills have to be used to improve, you can't get better at something just by looking at what an expert does you have to try it for yourself.

And all your existing flowchart shows is that you didn't understand what the expert (your teacher) was doing, or asking you to do. You have a day: start with a blank sheet ade your assignment and think about what you have to do. You'll get there if you try - good luck!

What do you need help with specifically?

Probably not - read what I said again.

This is why I talked about assumptions: every assembler I've used works the other way:

Operation Destination,Source

That's true for PIC, Z80, 8086(and successors), ARM, ... :D

Look at the assignment again, as I suggested. The 3rd test case specifically checks that you did exactly what the question asked for, but ... you didn't do that.
Look at the difference between your code output and the expected output - how do they differ? Why do they differ? What part of your code is responsible for that?
This is basic debugging: looking at what the code generates and what it should. If you wrote the code, it should be obvious exactly what is wrong, and how to fix it - and if you didn't write the code then it's a very good example of why you shouldn't copy and paste code blindly and hope it will work ... :D

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with - we get no other context for your project.
Imagine this: you go for a drive in the country, but you have a problem with the car. You call the garage, say "it broke" and turn off your phone. How long will you be waiting before the garage arrives with the right bits and tools to fix the car given they don't know what make or model it is, who you are, what happened when it all went wrong, or even where you are?

That's what you've done here. So stop typing as little as possible and try explaining things to people who have no way to access your project!

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with - we get no other context for your project.

Imagine this: you go for a drive in the country, but you have a problem with the car. You call the garage, say "it broke" and turn off your phone. How long will you be waiting before the garage arrives with the right bits and tools to fix the car given they don't know what make or model it is, who you are, what happened when it all went wrong, or even where you are?

That's what you've done here. So stop typing as little as possible and try explaining things to people who have no way to access your project!

Think about what you want to know, and what we might need to help you - "start parsing an email" tells us nothing about where you are with the project: we don't even know where you are getting the email and what format it might be in, let alone what it contains that you might be parsing for!

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

"It's not working" is one of the most useless problem descriptions we get: it tells us absolutely nothing about the problem. We don't know if you get an error message, or the wrong data, or even that that code compiles successfully!
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.
So tell us what happens when you run that code, what you expected to happen, how you checked what happened. Help us to help you!
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

This is an English language site, and we can only accept and answer questions in that language.
I have run this through Google Translate to produce a probably-good version, but you should check it and make sure it does say what you are actually asking.

I don't follow random link shorteners to unknown content, and neither will most of the people here.
What did the debugger show you was going on?

You're welcome!

So it's not homework, it just read exactly like a homework / exam question by total coincidence?

If you've "tried a lot to solve it" then you will have workings - lots of them. Add them to "your" question and explain what was wrong with each attempt ...

And?
What have you tried?
Where are you stuck?
What help do you need?

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

Debugging is just the name for something you probably do in the real world: working out why something happened. You look at what did happen, and decide how that differs from what you expected to happen. You turn on your PS5 and try to play a game, but it doesn't work. What's wrong?
That's the problem description, but in the real world you wouldn't start there: you'd think "did I press the button hard enough?" "Is it plugged in?" "Is the power on?" "Is the router working?" and you'd check those things before you started asking your mate questions.
That's the start of debugging: looking at the problem and identifying symptoms and their possible causes, then eliminating the "false leads" by gathering evidence that says that they aren't the reason: The light works, so the power is on. the plug is in the wall socket, and the other end in in the PS5, so it's not that. And so on: working away at one possible cause at a time until bingo! Your kid brother smashed the router with a hammer to annoy you, and that why your PS5 isn't working.

It's the same with software: you look at what code does do, and compare that with what you expect it to do. The debugger is just a tool you can use to "fine grain" the amount of code you are debugging at a time right down to an individual line of code at a time.

Give it a try - and no, I'm not going to try and wade through the steaming pile of dross that is anything computer related on YouTube to find a "debugging video" that isn't total crap for you. Life is too short for that to be an efficient use of my time!

You are joking, right?
Debugging is how you learn what works and what doesn't; you can't delegate it to others because if you do, you won't ever learn how to do it - and it's much, much easier to learn when you are dealing with 8 lines of code than when you have 8000, or 800,000 lines to find a bug in!

How do you expect to get any code working properly if you won't learn to fix it yourself?

Answer updated.

Answer updated.

Don't post this as a solution - use the "Have a Question or Comment?" button instead as that sends an email to me.
Posting as a solution just emails you - so unless I check (or someone else notices and mentions it to me) I don't know your reply exists!

I'll delete this solution, I have moved it into the body of my response.

You're welcome!

You're welcome!

And?
What does it do that you didn't expect, or not do that you did?
What have you tried to do to find out why?
Are there any error messages, and if so, where and when? What did you do to make them happen?

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

"It's not working" is one of the most useless problem descriptions we get: it tells us absolutely nothing about the problem. We don't know if you get an error message, or the wrong data, or even that that code compiles successfully!
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.
So tell us what happens when you run that code, what you expected to happen, how you checked what happened. Help us to help you!
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

"It's not working" is one of the most useless problem descriptions we get: it tells us absolutely nothing about the problem. We don't know if you get an error message, or the wrong data, or even that that code compiles successfully!
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.
So tell us what happens when you run that code, what you expected to happen, how you checked what happened. Help us to help you!
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

That was my other thought :D

And if you follow what the link is telling you to do, and do it as it tells you, you will end up with a nice simple app that uses GDI+.

You can then rip out all the stuff that uses it to draw stuff you don't need, and carefully add your project code back into that. What do you think you end up with?

And?
What does it do that you didn't expect, or not do that you did?
What have you tried to do to find out why?
Are there any error messages, and if so, where and when? What did you do to make them happen?

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your database, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with.
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

If you "mean something", say it. Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with - we get no other context for your project.
You want a faster system? Easy: throw away the whole idea and start again without recursion. Think about the problem and what might shortcut the whole operation.
Hint: start by finding the number of distinct values ...

"may i please inquire the C++ texts you have studied . i inquire because quite a bit of C++ code is missing for compilation w/o error . you may wish to consider re-reading ."

No idea - I started with C++ back in the early 90's, when I bought myself a copy of the Visual C++ V1.0 IDE which came with a two foot thick box of books, including C++ manuals. (That eventually evolved into the Visual Studio we know and love today.) That was probably when I moved from C to C++ but it might have been earlier - I spent most of the nineties drunk to a greater or lesser extent so the details are a bit fuzzy from this distance.

Fun, but high pressure work to stupidly short deadlines and an hour each way commuting (by motorcycle - it would have been two in a car), doubled when someone did something even more stupid than normal and managed to block the road. At least once a week. :sigh: Well glad to be out of it!

Central bootload and Threading OS embedded in an Industrial Inkjet printer for products as they went down production lines. I still see my handiwork in supermarkets when I go shopping! UI in C++, interrupts / drivers / OS in ARM assembler.

It's been a looong time since I last wrote any assembler code - this reminds me of how much I miss it!

It means that the pointer it returns can't be used on either side of an assignment operator unless you cat it to an valid type: void is a "zero length value", or a "null value" if you prefer. Think of how it is used when you define a function that returns a void: it returns nothing at all and trying to return any value at all will throw an error, as will trying to assign the result of the function call to any variable.

Seriously, get a book. You will learn much faster and better that you are asking random questions!

Pretty close (it was Tuesday I got jabbed) but I still get tired really easily. Getting better each day though.

Upvote his solution - I did!

You are going to find that a lot of stuff looks very similar: it often depends on context what it actually means! C uses a very limited set of characters so it ends up using them for different things. As I said the other day, it's a very old language so it shows it's age in many, many ways.

Seconded again!

Seconded!

Added code block to make it easier to get the the "Not an answer" button.

For the same reason eax got back to 144 originally.
Integers in your case are 32 bits: which means they can hold numbers from 0 hex to FFFFFFFF hex: when you reach the maximum increasing it one more takes you right back to 0 hex again.

all values in a signed integer that have the top bit set are negative by the way: so incrementing 7FFFFFFF hex by one takes it to the maximum negative value: 80000000 hex.

"Bedroom 53"? :D

Don't post this as a solution: use the "Have a Question or Comment?" button instead.
That way, an email is sent to the person you want to talk to, instead of the OP - in this case yourself!

And posting irrelevant stuff as a solution can look like "rep point hunting" which we class as site abuse and which can mean you get banned from the site if you aren't careful.

I'll delete this solution to prevent that happening.

Answer updated.

Don't post this as a solution - it isn't one, and that makes some people think you are a "rep point hunter" which we class as site abuse and that will get you banned from the site.
Use the comment system instead and you'll be fine. I'll delete this for you so nobody else assumes wrongly!

You're welcome!

You're welcome!

"Then, I will stop asking questions on syntax errors."
:laugh:
Don't make promises you can't keep! :D
I still to this day sometimes read what I meant to write instead of what I did ...

Read the link I gave you: it shows you how to handle syntax errors and get information from them that helps you to fix them without help.

It's not complicated, but it saves you hours and hours of waiting for others to notice you need help and fix them for you. It really is worth trying to fix them yourself first even right at the beginning!

Answer updated.

You are kidding, right?
"Add the row / column value to the total inside the loop instead." makes no sense to you?
How did you manage to create what code you have?

Which part do you not understand?

First thing to note: it's not "Java" - it's "Javascript".

They are very different languages, and only the latter run on the client. You can use Java to build a website backend, but it's pretty uncommon: C#, VB, PHP, and Python are the most common.

Secondly, you need to explain what you think is the "classical method" - there are a huge number of ways to build a website and none of them are uniquely known as the "classical method".

Excellent!
You mean that your assumption of the inputs was wrong? :laugh:

That's why you always start with the debugger - it shows you exactly what is going on, and saves you huge amounts of time. A couple of minutes with it would have saved you nearly a whole day! Every developer I know always tests code in the debugger because when it goes wrong you can see why.

Solution updated.

Solution updated.

Have a look at BackgroundWorker: it can pass whole messages back to the GUI via the progress event system.

While I applaud your urge to help people, it's a good idea to stick to new questions, rather than 9 year old ones. After that amount of time, it's unlikely that the original poster is at all interested in the problem any more!
Answering old questions can be seen as rep-point hunting, which is a form of site abuse. The more trigger happy amongst us will start the process of banning you from the site if you aren't careful. Stick to new questions and you'll be fine.

Edit your question using the "Improve question" button just underneath it.
Go to your source code and copy the line that is erroring, plus a dozen or so lines either side.
In this case, it says it is line 1, so you need to look at that and copy any methods that are called as well, or (if this is web based) any preceding PHP code blocks that set up the SQL command.
Paste them into the "What have you tried?" area, using the "Code block" option of the "Paste As" pop-up that appears.
Press the "Update question" button at the bottom.

Without the setup code, we have no idea what SQL is getting, so we can't help you fix it!

Are you planning on modifying "a" inside the loop at any point?

This is not a good question - we cannot work out from that little what you are trying to do.
Remember that we can't see your screen, access your HDD, or read your mind - we only get exactly what you type to work with - we get no other context for your project. You are going to have to give us a load more info on exactly what you are trying to achieve.

Imagine this: you go for a drive in the country, but you have a problem with the car. You call the garage, say "it broke" and turn off your phone. How long will you be waiting before the garage arrives with the right bits and tools to fix the car given they don't know what make or model it is, who you are, what happened when it all went wrong, or even where you are?

That's what you've done here. So stop typing as little as possible and try explaining things to people who have no way to access your project!

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

You're welcome!

You have told us nothing about what is happening, or when it happens; what you have done to try and isolate the problem, and what you found. We have no idea what you exp[ect to happen, let alone what actually did - and we have no access to your DB, so we can't even begin to test it!

So tell us what it is doing that you didn't expect, or not doing that you did.
Tell us what you did to get it to happen.
Tell us any error messages.

Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.

"It doesn't work" is probably the most useless problem report we get - and we get it a lot. It tells us nothing about what is happening, or when it happens.
So tell us what it is doing that you didn't expect, or not doing that you did.
Tell us what you did to get it to happen.
Tell us any error messages.
Use the "Improve question" widget to edit your question and provide better information.