ByteJuggler

Thanks. I've now "followed" all the forums as I'd like to get notifications about new content. However unfortunately you can seemingly only get email notifications about new material in the forums you're subscribed to, you can't seemingly get "push" style notifications about new topics in forums, the way you can when people reply to topics you've participated in? Also it would be nice to be able to mass subscribe/unsubscribe from all/mutlipel forums at once. It was a minor pain to go through each forum and click the required button. And as I don't really want to be emailed, per se, about new indivual postings, I'm going to to have to go back through each forum and disable this again, or change the notification to something less frequent. Or am I missing something again? 🙂

Actually I just found the "notification settings" on the forum and noticed the little globe icon (which in fact notified me similar to the Google icon), so it seems my comment/suggestion is rather off the mark, and there's quite a bit of "push" support of the sort I suggested already. I need to just keep this site open I suppose! 😄

To make a general observation first: There's a reason why tools like "Everything" exists, and why TortoiseSVN (and TortoiseGit and TortoiseBazaar etc) has a cache built in, and/or why Windows itself creates search indexes etc. to speed searching in Explorer. And it all boils down to the same thing, the fact that searching the filesystem via the existing API's isn't particularly fast. The broad solution in all of the above cases is conceptually the same: Create an index or cache of the stuff you're trying to search. And so the answer to your question is then IMHO essentially the same: You have to create some sort of cache to speed the type of search you're doing and think about how that cache is to be maintained. In one of the solutions we've developed we basically wrote something basic but similar to "Everything" that hooks into the Windows filesystem change notifications to keep a cache updated, which is then used to find file locations vastly faster than trying to trundle over gigantic folder trees. Obviously this also means you get to own a new set of additional problems/responsibilities, e.g. dealing with cache integrity/consistency/reliability etc. but its possible to deal with these.

I realise this is slightly late to the party but another possible way to possibly tackle this problem is to actually instantiate the modules containing queries and then iterate over the component collection of each form/module looking for the relevant query component types and then doing whatever you want with them. (E.g. serialise to file, write out parameters, etc.) Obviously this approach has some caveats that might make it less desirable in some instances (not least dependency issues). Still it should not be that hard to come up with a project that just includes everything referenced etc.) Anyway just a thought.