Another Semi-Useful Utility

For about 2 years now I’ve been thinking about writing a little utility to automate the copy/paste process for times when you’ve got to replicate the same line of data for 100+ different values.

This comes up quite often at work when I’ve got to write a t-sql stored procedure to validate and insert data into one of our database tables. I’ll have somewhere around 15-20 columns at least to handle, and I have to create parameters for the procedures, potentially select statements to pull the data from a holding table, then another select statement to clean up and/or validate the data, then generate the insert statement.

And the situation is always the same, I’ll have a list of columns, the parameters are always named @p_<columnname>, and the select statements all look the same as well.

The solution has always been, copy, paste, replace. For 2 years I laboured through this, and finally last week I decided to do something about it…

I call that something the Copy\Paste Killer. It is a very simple (and right now ugly) utility that lets you create a template that will be copy/pasted over and over for every row of data you provide in the data boxes.

So that’s that for my every-once-in-a-while-monthly productivity apps.

Two weeks ago at work we had our first annual (hopefully soon to be semi-annual) Fieldpoint Golf Day. My boss took a bunch of pictures of my pathetic swing (maybe they’ll make their way here sometime), and one of the other guys got a bystander to take this picture at the end of the day:

Fieldpoint Golf Aug 2008
From Left: Andy, Steve, Phil, Boris (aka JP Ricciardi), Mike, John (me)

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