Extracting Attachments from Selected Emails

This is a continuation of the article “Automating the Process of Extracting *.sql Attachments from Emails and Executing them on a set of SQL Server Databases”. If you have not read that article, I recommend you do that before proceeding further.

The Problem

Find a way to extract all attachments from selected emails into a selected folder on hard-drive.

The Solution

1. Open Microsoft Outlook.
2. Click Tools > Macro > Visual Basic Editor (or press Alt+F11) to open the VBA Editor.

Automating the Process of Extracting *.sql Attachments from Emails and Executing them on a set of SQL Server Databases

Recently I was off on a long leave from my work. After returning to office, I found that there are so many emails accumulated in my inbox, and many of them contained SQL script files to be executed on my local SQL Server test databases. Extracting each file into a folder and then executing each of these files (*.sql files) on each database was just like the task I always hate. There were some hundred of these attachments, and each file had to be executed on about 6 databases. So if I do everything manually, it will take me days to finish this.

So I set off for making a script that will automate this.

To my Blog Readers

First things first. My apologies for not updating the blog for quite sometime now.

The past few months have been pretty difficult for me. I lost my wife and the only son in a train accident. After months of severe depression, I managed to pull myself back into reality. You can now expect to see some new entries in the blog pretty soon  🙂

Pradeep

Microsoft MVP again!

I got awarded Microsoft MVP (Visual Basic) again today.

I want to say a huge THANK YOU to Microsoft, my MVP Lead Abhishek Kant, the Visual Basic Team and anyone else who contributed in getting me the MVP award again. It is a recognition of contributions to the Technical Communities worldwide and I’m quite proud of it. 🙂

Persisting the values of Controls on your Form

This is a common situation and a frequently asked question on various technical forums and websites.

• I want the controls to retain values after the form/application is closed and opened again.
• I want to persist the values in textbox after my application is restarted.
• I want the form to open exactly how I left it the last time.
• I want the form to remember its state and persist it. etc.etc.

Today we will see how to resolve this problem in our VB.NET applications.

Insert a String / Text in Large File using VB.NET

Introduction

If you have been a VB programmer for a while you know that inserting strings in large files is a pain.

The most usual way is to read the whole file into a variable in memory, insert your string in that variable, and then write the whole file back to disk. This works OK for small files. But is a problem with extraordinarily large files, since it would involve large memory overheads.

Stored Procedure to Benchmark Performance of two SQL Statements or SP

Many a times we feel a need to quickly compare two SQL queries or Stored Procedure performance to judge which one of the two is performing better.

The longer (better) way is to properly analyze the execution plan and manually fine-tune it. But that takes a lot of time. The shorter way is to just run those two queries and compare the time taken. But after running them for the first time, the result is not always accurate because the results are displayed from cache whenever possible (i.e. second time onwards).

The following stored procedure can be used to compare the performance of two queries/SPs.

Add Undo/Redo or Back/Forward Functionality to your Application

I have often seen people asking on various forums how to implement Undo/Redo functionality or Back/Forward functionality in their applications. Typically an undo/redo in text-editors or back/forward in file/folder explorers or customized webbrowsers are common examples.

So today we will see how to develop a class to implement such functionality.

The IsNot Operator in VB.NET

One of the most underused operator in VB.NET is the IsNot operator. That’s because there was really no significant use of introducing this operator. All was going well without this operator too. I find that many experienced programmers are still unaware of the existence of this operator in VB.NET.

The old way of doing things was:

If Not object1 Is object2 Then whatever

Disable Button click, ImageButton click and/or form submit on Enter Keypress

By default, if you press enter in any textbox, the default button specified for that Panel or form etc. gets fired automatically. Even if no default button is specified, the first button or ImageButton gets clicked. This is ok in most of the situations where we want to submit the form or want the buttons/imagebuttons to get clicked. But in some cases you don’t want any Button to get clicked when you press enter in any textbox and that’s a problem. For asp.net Button controls you can simply set the UseSubmitBehavior="False" and get away with them. But I could not find any similar property of ImageButton control to stop it from getting clicked.