[update 10:08pm] I know that tail exists for Windows by using cgywin or some of the other ports. If you view the article you’ll see that this utility isn’t run from the command line and uses VB.NET code, which I thought was a interesting…]

From the artima newsletter: Windows tail: “The UNIX operating system has long had a set of really good text file processing utilities. On of the utilities is a program named tail. What tail does is it displays the bottom of a file and then waits for any new information to be written to the end of that file then it displays that information, scrolling up as it goes along. This is perfect for monitoring log files to watch them actually grow as information is being written to them.

Enter Windows Tail, or wtail.exe. This is a program written in VB.NET using the Microsoft DOTNET Framework 1.1 which must be installed on your system in order for this program to run.“

Spent a bit this morning wading through .NET documentation trying to find out how one retrieves the number of records returned from a query. Turns out it’s pretty simple. First you get your query rolling:

// get the connection string from settings
String cs = System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings[“connectionString”].ToString();
// get a sql connection using the connection string
SqlConnection sqlcon = new SqlConnection(cs);
SqlDataAdapter adapter= new SqlDataAdapter(“select * from yourtable”, sqlcon);
DataSet dataset = new DataSet();
adapter.Fill(dataset,”mytable”);

At this point you’ve run the query and you have a DataSet which you can then loop over like any other collection, ie:

foreach (DataRow d in dataset.Tables[“mytable”].Rows)

or you can retrieve the number of rows:

DataRowCollection drc = dataset.Tables[“mytable”].Rows;
Console.WriteLine(“there are ” + drc.Count + ” rows in the query.”);

or even quicker like this:

Console.WriteLine(“there are ” + dataset.Tables[“mytable”].Rows.Count + ” rows in the query.”);

Back to work….