Wolfgang Riedmann Blog

Today I have lost about two hours to work around a very strange MySQL Connector.NET behaviour.

This code

oMySQLDataReader:IsDbNull( nFieldPos )

gives an exception if the value is a date and has a null value. The exact error was

“unable to convert MySQL date/time value to System.datetime”

I have tried several things, but even

oMySqlDataReader:GetMySQLDateTime( nFieldPos)

fails.
Some messages suggested to add

“Allow Zero Datetime=true;”

to the connection string, but with this one I was unable to retrieve ANY date value.

Only adding

“Convert Zero Datetime=true;”

to the connection string solved the problem.

It was driving me crazy: I was not able to position a form before showing it. It was shown every time the height of my taskbar below the desired vertical position.

The solution was very simple: assign FormStartPosition.Manual to the :StartPosition member of the form:

self:StartPosition := FormStartPosition.Manual
self:Size := Size{ oDesktop:Width, oDesktop:Height }
self:Location := Point{ nX, nY }

After searching a while for a powerful and affordable grid control, I have found iGrid.NET from 10Tec, an Ukrainian software house.

iGrid.NET Home

Not only that this grid is ways faster than the DataGridView and the ListView from .NET framework itself, and priced at a very affordable level, but also the author has replied very fast to my questions – so also the support is very good.