.NET or ColdFusion ?

Umm why not both?

I think having an understanding of multiple languages is a good thing. Before working with ColdFusion my preferred web language was PHP. At that time I was also writing some thick clients in VB.NET I still like to work with other languages and recently I have been brushing up on C#.

So what's the point of learning languages if your not going to use them? Well occasionally you do and it can really come in handy. Recently I worked on a project that had some pre-built code in c# and they needed a Web interface to part of there system. As alot of the processing was already built in .NET I took what I needed compiled it to a dll and just invoked that from ColdFusion ( yeah fancy that a shop that had both .NET and CF ).

This is a handy feature of ColdFusion 8 and 9 and we rarely see any examples or mentions of this.

I made this quick demo to show how you can pass some simple data to and from .NET from CF.

Yes it's alot of code for a 4 line cfquery but it's just a demo.

.NET Code
<br /> using System;<br /> using System.Data.SqlClient;<br /> using System.Collections;<br /> <br /> class DataReader_SQL<br /> {<br /> public ArrayList SQLRes(String sqlString)<br /> {<br /> ArrayList result = new ArrayList();<br /> <br /> SqlConnection thisConnection;<br /> SqlCommand thisCommand;<br /> <br /> try<br /> {<br /> thisConnection = <br /> new SqlConnection(@"Data Source=dataBaseIp,1433;database=sampleData;User id=sa;Password=secretPassword;");<br /> thisConnection.Open();<br /> thisCommand = thisConnection.CreateCommand();<br /> thisCommand.CommandText = sqlString;<br /> SqlDataReader thisReader = thisCommand.ExecuteReader();<br /> Hashtable HTdemo = new Hashtable();<br /> <br /> while (thisReader.Read())<br /> {<br /> HTdemo = new Hashtable();<br /> HTdemo.Add("Message", thisReader["message"].ToString());<br /> HTdemo.Add("UserName", thisReader["userName"].ToString());<br /> result.Add(HTdemo);<br /> }<br /> thisReader.Close();<br /> thisConnection.Close();<br /> <br /> }<br /> catch (SqlException e)<br /> {<br /> Console.WriteLine(e.Message);<br /> }<br /> return result;<br /> }<br /> <br /> }<br />

CF Code:

<br /> <cfset dotNet = CreateObject('.NET','DataReader_SQL', '#expandPath("./SQLCSharp.dll")#') /><br /> <br /> <cfset queryResult= dotNet.SQLRes(" SELECT TOP (10) id, message, userName, eventTime FROM ContactMsg") /><br /> <br /> <cfdump var="#queryResult#" /><br />

Result: