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....

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....

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

... It seems that more and more people in this society are unwilling to accept this responsibility or understand the concepts of free will and choice ... The freedom to make the wrong choices is vital to a person’s actual ability to make the right ones. This is...

I’m managing to get my fingers to keep working despite the latest cold snaps and have finished the first draft of “Programming Microsoft Access”, the series on Visual Basic for Applications that I’ve been working on for the last couple weeks.  Now I’m going through the chapters and revising...