Andrew MacNeill got to see my blog in Palm Springs and we sat down and walked through some of the power of Radio Userland’s blogging and news aggregator tools. He was impressed. So, as soon as he got home, he set up a Blogger page here. Welcome aboard the blogosphere, Andrew!
Archive | June, 2003
Home at last, for a few hours
What a tough trip! Twenty-three hours door-to-door. The AmericaWest Express puddle-hopper from Palm Springs didn’t bother to show up until an hour late. Like many travellers, that meant I missed my connection in Phoenix. Had to wait hours and then fly in the wrong direction to the City of Lost Wages and wait more hours for a flight to Boston, arriving at 2 AM vice 7:30 PM the previous evening. Of course, there was no bus to get home to New Hampshire at that hour, either. Not one of the three flights I took yesterday left on time – two were over an hour late and the middle one a half-hour. While the staff were helpful and courteous, you can’t run an airline if you can’t move passengers where and when you promise them.
Watch that STSN hotel agreement
Just checking out, I noticed that I was charged for four days of STSN internet access at $9.95 a day. Apparently, somewhere in the fine print I skimmed was the agreement that I was signing up for my entire stay, and not for a single day, as I had assumed. I had been taking advantage of the conference wireless and frugally avoiding use in my room. Hopefully, I can get the unused days taken off the bill. But watch it out there, folks! That’s a rip-off I hadn’t anticipated.
DevCon 2003 fades into history
On my way into the closing session. Another DevCon done. Might not get to post again until I’m home – a long day on the road tomorrow.
He who knows cannot say, he who says cannot know
Mark Michaelis, a SourceSafe MVP, posts to his blog the following:
Unfortunately I can’t comment on the future of Visual Source Safe except to say that significant work is being done in this area. If this MSDN chat is any indication, the demand is huge as the entire chat is essentially consumed with, “will the next version support…” type questions.
It’s great to hear that there’s some progress being made. As the author of the only currently-available book, Essential SourceSafe, I’ve contacted aa number of Program Managers at Microsoft trying to get involved in new versions, and finding out if a revision to the book might make sense. I was surprised at finding SourceSafe 6.0d in my latest MSDN shipment without a word it was coming.
Day Two at DevCon
Saw great sessions today:
- Using Web Services with Visual FoxPro 8 – Doug Hennig
- Using Visual FoxPro 8 to Provide and Consume XML – Toni Feltman
- Graphing with Visual FoxPro – Ted Roche
- Lunch with the Speakers for me. Had a great time with the team at Omnicell, Inc.
- Building a Data Access Layer with Visual FoxPro 8 – Toni Feltman
- How to Be an Independent Consultant – Mac Rubel
Next comes the DevCon dinner party.
Microsoft Backs Down on Windows 2000 EULA
Reprise: Did I just feel the earth move?
Steve Gillmor talks about the Allchin Tax in this article in Computer Reseller News. The punchline:
Microsoft’s RSS engineers are already hard at work–they need buy in from the leadership and a core authoring object that plays fair across the XML blogosphere.
Sounds like quite the challenge.
Did I just feel the earth move?
William Grosso: “Is it just me, or did we have a month of good, old-fashioned, Internet time in the web browser universe.” Link via Scripting News.
Bonus Session One Notes
Europa goals Based on wish list customer feedback Enhance database language and types Additional end user UI features Increase developer productivity Improve report writer significantly Extend XML, .NET and SQL Server interop More designer hooks for extensiblity UPDATE: Thanks to Tamar Granor for a few updates. Top 10 ER Rejections Object oriented puzzle Localized Pig Latin version ACTIVATE WINDOW mywindow NOWINDOW WAIT WINDOW NOWAIT WINDOW IN WINDOW whatwindow Help rewritten in Dr. Suess Language (Fox In Box) DWIM() function More product bugs and perfomance impediments XCMD support SET RTFM ON/OFF BROWSE wizard CreateObject(ãFoxClippyä) Europa Reporting Protect existing FRX investment Added output flexibility Open architectures Better resuse story Design-time improvements Access to report objects at runtime Design-Time Improvements International FontCharSet ö font script support Grid Scale dialog ö inches, centimeters Design-time labels PROTECTED design mode Tooltips Better DataEnvirnonment story _REPORTBUILDER, Design-time events _REPORTDESIGNER Runtime Improvements Object Oriented syntax More flexibility with Report Chaining New output types (e.g., XML, HTML) and open architecture to plug-in 3rd party output engines. Report processing events. Europa has no limits... Calvin video USE Customer, IntelliSense kicks in, now color changing as it is being typed, compiling in the background. Randy demos New limits: arrays > 64k Program code (individual procedures) unlimited Huge number of features of SQL:
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No limit on joins
No limit on subqueries
No limit on UNIONs
No limit on # of tables
No limit on IN() args
Multiple subquery nesting
GROUP BY in correlated subquery
Sub-select in FROM clause
Subquery in select list projection
ORDER BY using field name with UNION clause
Optimize LIKE "sometext%"
Optimize TOP N
UNIONs in INSERT INTO ·.SELECT
Subquey in UPDATE
Correlate INSERT/DELETE
Optimize deleted tags
Running user code in the property window reads a memo field and can execute script (IntelliSense in the memo field!) wrapped in XML. Example of Inputbox() call to prompt for custom properties. This might support Capitalization for custom properties or ãFavoritesä tab for property sheet.