I remember my first MP3 player back in 2004. I don’t remember the brand but it was an off-brand made in Japan with an liquid crystal display, a manual that had been badly translated into English and a high price tag that did as much as the rest of the device to show how new […]
Back to basics … my first TracFone
A couple of years ago, I was dazzled by the new HTC EVO 4G smartphone that a supervisor had gotten himself. I was about ready to change out phones, anyway and when I saw all the things the Android phone could do that my old phone couldn’t, I was sold. I was taken aback slightly […]
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15 Min
Tweaking the System – Finding the most efficient application design
Efficiency is one of the overriding considerations when designing almost any kind of application. This requirement affects everything from the algorithms used to the distribution of work within the system.
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1 Min
Using Typed Datasets in Visual Studio
If you’ve worked with Visual Studio or .NET for long, you’re probably familiar with the System.Data.DataSet class which enables you to create a collection of data in memory, often retrieved from an SQL database. Within a dataset object, you can have a series of related DataTables that categorize the data. Moving further down, each table can […]
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14 Min
Weekend Links
I’d planned to spend the weekend writing up a new programming article for the site but it got a little hi-jacked by another project I was working on. On Friday, I needed to figure out how to generate ZIP files from a website and just couldn’t put it down for the weekend. The situation is […]
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5 Min
Learning PHP
One of the projects I started late last year was learning some non-Microsoft technologies, one being PHP; a scripting language that is used behind websites in order to provide more dynamic features than ordinary HTML is capable of. PHP has been in use since 1995 and is one of the most widely available web technologies. […]
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5 Min
Bringing things up to date …
Every so often, I remember that I have a blog attached to the site and I make new promises to myself to keep it up to date but it doesn’t seem to happen that often. 2011 was a busy year for me which was one reason I didn’t update the blog much. It’s easier to […]
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5 Min
March already?
I thought about taking the blog down when I realized how long it had been since I posted here but instead, I decided to say goodbye to Facebook for awhile and devote those misspent energies to something a little more productive. I started a new full-time job in January, which is another reason I’ve been […]
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3 Min
Switching between Access 2010 windows
A visitor to the site asked about using ALT-TAB to switch between open Access windows. This refers to the “Windows in Taskbar” feature which was available in Access prior to Access 2007. You could set Access to display a button for every open Access window on the Windows Task Bar and use the standard ALT-TAB […]
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2 Min
Sorting it all out …
I wrote awhile back about how I used Microsoft Outlook to keep track of things I’m working on and store reminders for project ideas that would be great to work on someday. I’m still getting the hang of it but I’m a little closer. The Outlook calendar is a great tool. I hadn’t used it much […]
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5 Min