You have to work with Collection classes to accomplish your task http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7y3x785f(v=VS.80).aspx
*Selecting a Collection Class* http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6tc79sx1(v=VS.80).aspx On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 6:14 PM, tonysin <[email protected]> wrote: > I need someone to point me in the right direction. i'll give a few > paragraphs of background, but if you just want the question, skip down > to "HERE IS THE QUESTION:" > > I was a C programmer in scientific apps before I retired. I'm now > puttering around with Visual C#. So I know how to program, but I'm a > little shaky with OOP, and I'm clueless with databases. > > There is a freeware disk cataloger called Cathy that I have used for > many years. It's small and fast. You give it a starting point, e.g. > folder, drive, CD, etc., and it very quickly builds a database of the > files from there down, recursing through all the subdirectories. You > do that with as many drives or CDs as you want, and you end up with a > bunch of little databases, one for each drive (or CD or any > combination). Then when you want to know where a particular jpg file > is, you just type in part of the name, and Cathy almost instantly > finds every file on every drive that matches the string. I have > dozens of drives with several terabytes of data in millions of files, > and a search only takes a second. Rebuilding the catalog of a system > partition can take a minute, though. > > So, I love Cathy, but it's a bit dated, and its limits are beginning > to be a problem. The big problem is it's not unicode, and I have a > lot of files and folders with Asian characters that it can't handle > correctly. I'd also like more flexibility in the search, e.g.ranges > on the date and size, and regex in the search string. So I want to > write a windows forms app that does all that, just for my use (unless > Bill G calls and offers me a million bucks). > > HERE IS THE QUESTION: What is the best way to create and access > databases in a VC# program? By best, I mean reasonably fast, > reasonably easy to program, and it's all done within my VC# forms app, > i.e. I don't build the DB in SQLServer or something and then use VC# > to query, I do EVERYTHING in VC#. > > I have been googling around, and there are all kinds of sites that > talk about database programming with C#, but they all seem to have > different approaches. There is ADO, LINQ, SQL Server, etc. I looked > at some books in the bookstore, but I couldn't find one that showed > how to create databases programmatically within VC#. Half of them had > you type the data in yourself, and the other half had you use > SQLServer or something to create the DB, and then use VC# to query it. > > I don't want to do either of those. I want to programatically recurse > through my folders and enter every file I find into a DB, from within > the VC# app. Then I want to be able to enter a search string and some > date and size ranges, and see all the files that match. > > If someone could tell me generally how to do that, I can probably find > a book to get the details. If someone could point me to a website > that talks about it, even better. > > Thanks for any help. > >
