Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Read MS Access File into CFQuery

Here is code snippet that will read arbitrary Microsoft Access file, and return the result in CFQuery. No Coldfusion data source is required.

Environment:
- Coldfusion 9, 64-bit

Notice, in the snippet, there is a dump of all DB drivers loaded by Coldfusion. So, if you ever need access to other dynamic data connection, just swap out the connection string in the sample.

Friday, February 07, 2014

TaskKill vs. PSKill

I've been using PSKill for at least 7 years now. Just today, I found out TASKKILL is actually better than PSKILL in all fronts. I should finally stop using PSKILL. My finding is that TASKKILL in Windows 7 has all the features that PSKILL provides, plus the following advantages:

  • No download needed
  • No user agreement needed for the first time user (which is a big plus for server side automated execution)
  • Can kill *ALL* processes with the image name (compare to PSKILL only kill one of them. So with PSKILL, I will need to repeatedly invoke it until all the processes are gone. This is no fun when you are trying to run in automatically on a server.)
  • Richer command line options