Question

I have developed an application using VB.NET, Visual Studio 2008 and the SQL Server database. Now I want to ignore the database (it has 1 table as customer (name,password,hour,minute)) as I don’t want my client to install SQL Server separately or other overheads.

I am planning to do the whole using file handling in VB.NET (manipulating the data in files itself, for example change username, password, etc.). As I am new I don’t actually know the proper way and of course need assistance.

Answer 1

I’m not sure what file format you’d like to use for your flat files, but one easy option is to use XML. You can certainly generate your own format, but there’s some easy tooling in VB.Net for reading and writing XML files.

To write an xml file:

Public Sub SaveAs(ByVal fileName As String)
    Dim writer As Xml.XmlWriter
    Dim settings As New Xml.XmlWriterSettings
    settings.Indent = True
    settings.CloseOutput = True
    writer = Xml.XmlWriter.Create(fileName, settings)

    writer.WriteStartElement("customer")

    writer.WriteStartElement("customerName")
    writer.WriteValue("customer #1")
    writer.WriteEndElement()

    writer.WriteEndElement()

    writer.Close()
End Sub

Reading from an XML document you can use some of the inline VB XML language features:

Public Sub Load(ByVal fileName as String)
    If Not IO.File.Exists(fileName) Then Throw New Exception("File not found.")
    Dim xDoc as XDocument

    Try 
        xDoc = XDocument.Load(fileName)
    Catch e as Xml.XmlException
        Throw New FileFormatException()
    End Try

    Dim customers = xDoc..<customer>
    For each customer in customers
        Dim customerName = customer.<customerName>.Value
        //'do something with the data
    Next

End Sub

Beth Massi has some good videos on working with XML files and data in VB