My previous lives have left me pretty handy with C#. I only really used .net 1.1 for serious heavy lifting, so I'm finding all kinds of nice suprises (like generics - strongly typed ArrayLists at last!) in .net 3.5 now that I've started using Visual Studio 2008 (and finding that the free Express Edition is fine for commercial development came as a rather nice suprise too!).
One of the big down sides with the whole Microsoft ecosystem is the cost of getting off the ground, so as a startup we are going down a pretty standard open source tool route (i.e. LAMP servers). However, we have some fairly sophisticated spidering to be done to get structured data from a fairly large number of web sites of widely varying quality, so in the interests of getting up and running quickly, I've developed the spider in C# (with a fairly massive leg-up from Jeff Heaton - thanks Jeff!). I need to get the spidered data back into MySQL so that our other applications can use it, which brings me to today's problem.
One of the big down sides with the whole Microsoft ecosystem is the cost of getting off the ground, so as a startup we are going down a pretty standard open source tool route (i.e. LAMP servers). However, we have some fairly sophisticated spidering to be done to get structured data from a fairly large number of web sites of widely varying quality, so in the interests of getting up and running quickly, I've developed the spider in C# (with a fairly massive leg-up from Jeff Heaton - thanks Jeff!). I need to get the spidered data back into MySQL so that our other applications can use it, which brings me to today's problem.
Continue reading Connecting C# to MySQL.
