Thursday, May 20, 2004 - Posts
Do I even have to spell this out for anyone?
I worked with a team that did so many access-to-web projects that we had a canned “Why Access Sucks for More than your Desktop” document ready to send as part of our first response. I forget the specifics, it's been so long (thank God!), but we had a clever acronym like the “5 Ds: Data Integrity, Distributed Accessibility . . .” I wish I had a copy of that just in case . . . it was well written and had tons of cited sources.
I'm not even going to discuss the details of my current frustration; suffice it to say that it's after midnight and I'm not doing anything close to .Net -- my general rule is that only cool .Net stuff occupies my attention after 12 midnight, but an emergency came up for a customer and so here I am. I'm just taking a break before I wrestle with Access anew. This is just one of those things that working for a small company entails . . . there's the Access customer from time to time (although we've grown them into SQL Server and a split DB architecture -- steps in a positive direction!). The Ldb files, data compaction and corruption, access specific security, replication, the list goes on and on. I can't leave out On error resume next.
Like Bob Reselman's Coding Slave asks: do you spend more time with code you hate than with the people you love? Tonight I sure do. It's funny to consider I'll be enjoying TechEd stuff in a few days, but I've got these MS Access hurdles to overcome before I can get there. TechEd is my light at the end of the tunnel. I don't recall seeing any Access database classes on the TechEd agenda . . .
Happy .Netting (and not Accessing)!
It's starting to sink in that I'm going to Tech-Ed. I leave soon and I started looking closely at the conference sessions -- I'm going to have some tough choices to make regarding tracks and sessions. To begin, I'm committed to a full Sunday of INETA with an evening Coding Slave Session tossed in for good measure -- if nothing else, I may be able to buy Bob Reselman a beer.
As for the regular conference, it's looking like a frenzy of Sharepoint, Biztalk, SOA, CLR, and WS-E. Some of the Wintellect guys are presenting, and I'd like to catch their new stuff since they were outstanding at Devscovery; no, Darrell, my nerd crush will not be there. A chance to hear Don Box and Anders Hejlsberg shouldn't be passed up, either. Oh man!
It's like ordering dinner from the Cheescake Factory, every entry sounds great and is probably more than enough!
Happy .Netting!
If you're like me and often installing software to your computer, it can be a pain to burn ISO files (like the one you get from MSDN Subscriber downloads). Daemon-Tools to the rescue. It lets you create virtual drives and mount ISO files directly (no burning or Roxio-hell required!).
Here's how it helped me:
I downloaded an enormous ISO file from MSDN, fired up Virtual Daemon Manager to mount the ISO file without having to create a CD first. The Virtual CD-Rom drive read the ISO file fine and launched the installation. I thought I was in the clear until, in the process of the installation, the setup package prompted for me to swap out my CD and put another CD in the drive (apparently there were some file from a related MSFT product required for this install). My initial reaction was . . . crap . . . but the Daemon-Tool manager lets me mount up to 4 virtual drives at once, so I just mounted another drive to the other ISO file and I was in the clear. For those of you with functional CD burners (and functional burning software), this will still save you some hassle!
Thanks to lil' Tim from Optimize for sharing this with me! I'm sure there's other interesting facets to Dameon-Tools, so check it out.
Happy .Netting!
The company I work for finally got rid of the Flash monstrosity that used to be our website . . . now we've got a clean HTML site with content management for the marketing and sales folks. www.OptimizeIT.net Still a lot of work to do and we've got Staffing and Training sections to add (we also need to copy all of our sales propaganda over and I've got a few white papers to move), but it's a vast improvement. It's also 100% .Net which makes me feel all nice and warm inside.
If you've got a morbid curiosity about the old Flash site, it still lingers at www.optimizeit.net/home.html. Flash is a great tool when used in moderation . . . but having an IT site 100% in Flash only makes the company attractive to the video game addicts or design phreaks and not key decision makers in a business (who would contract our services!).
That being said, I still really like the Theory7 site (at www.theory7.com).