Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

ZDNet has an article titled Linux Ready for the Desktop. While I do enjoy Ubuntu quite a bit (at least on one desktop) and I would never doubt the usefulness of Linux on a wide variety of machines, my concerns over open source systems have become more widespread with issues about forks . Linux is certainly a different scenario than MySQL but consider this - mySQL has been considered a viable alternative for commercial RDBMS' for how long? It's been around since 1994 but has only really become a force to reckon with in the past 10 years. Certain incarnations of Linux are certainly ready for the desktop (OpenOffice is arguably a good alternative to MS Office - bloat and all) - but then so are an entirely cloud or web-based OSes. My #1 concern with any OS that I'm going to place on my desktop is "does it make me more productive?" (an offshoot of that would be "does it make any of my clients more productive?") I'm a firm believer that people will pay fo...

Andy Kramek offers some great samples of identifying how long a string can be in a particular font. This is something that every UI designer needs to consider when dealing with screen design. While many VFP developers will use FONTMETRIC and TXTWIDTH, Andy has wrapped it all into a fairly easy function to call. Check it out here FoxPro VFP

I have (first correction - thanks Matt!) been pulling together links for a larger "start of the year" post and decided to scale it back and try something a bit different. The various sites that AKSEL manages will be going through a "re-branding" exercise in the near future but one of my goals this year is to follow Chris Brogan's Three Words idea (Freedom. Consistency. Communication - I'm still deciding...) as well as working in some of Mark Riffey's ideas into my weekly schedule. Rod Paddock asked "What's in a title" - and pointed out that one thing developers can do to become better developers is to adopt more agile practices - and he lists several practices and his experience with them. That's a great goal for developers but what about "database developers"? There are lots of developers out there but almost every role needs to be qualified further: web developer, application developer, database developer. Are there other q...

I realized how quiet I've been here and while I have a number of posts waiting in draft, I've been so busy it's been impossible to complete them. But I did want to post this after I dealt with it yesterday. I've been on an ASP.Net contract now for about 3 months which is an experience all unto itself - non MVC, non standard ASP.Net app using the DevExpress components. Since this is someone else's application "framework" and I'm simply a hired hand to help finish it off, I find I'm using parts of Visual Studio that I've never really thought of and/or used that often. I'm not referring to actual development pieces like Datasets or class designers but the more basic elements of any IDE. It drives me nuts when things don't use the same short-cut keys that I'm used to, and while we can always change them to suit our moods, that's not the way I usually like to go. We live in a Windows world and so are used to certain things: F1= Help,...

Great post by Dare, Scalability: I Don't Think That Word Means What You Think It Does following up on a post from Scott Loganbill at Google about their choice of "scalable" services. Scalability is a funny question. Every application is designed to handle a certain type of architecture - it's usually one of those fundamental sales analysis questions "and how many orders do you typically process a day? How many people do you have working for you". While scalability problems can be due to both technology and design, it's typically design that is the major culprit. (ok, yes, the guy that said he can run a 15,000 transaction a day system in Access - he likely chose the WRONG technology). But everytime I think of scalability, I always think of 37 Signal's approach to scalability - in short, "Do you really need 12 servers now if you can run on two for a year?" - note read the comments from David Hansson " ... Not worrying too much about sca...

Chris Saad has a great post over on his blog: Leadership includes saying no « Paying Attention Not sure if he just went through a specific scenario to inspire the posting but it's a great read, especially for technical managers. One of my clients had a problem: they have a list of over 397 enhancement requests to their product. Now, to be fair, some of those are fairly cosmetic and but at least 200 of them require some kind of review for someone to say "no - we are not doing this" So why don't they? Because when they get in front of their customers, "no" is the hardest thing to say. And I'm a terrible accomplice but because if they ask "can it be done?" , the answer is "yes, it can". The real question should be "SHOULD it be done?" When some people think about feature creep, they tend to think of it in relevance to a particular function - but in this post, think about feature creep being about the entire product line. As a ...

Garrett pointed over to this post Stevey's Blog Rants: Dynamic Languages Strike Back which is really a transcript of a speech Steve Yegge gave at Stanford. Very interesting read/ video whichever you prefer. When reading about half way through (I've marked to come back to but it's definitely a good read) , I immediately thought of the TIOBE index and how excited VFP developers (including myself) got when we had broken the top 20 - why? because of this quote "So that brings us full circle back to the point of this topic, which is: the languages we have today, sorted by popularity at this instant, are probably going to stay about that popular for the next ten years." (and yes, technically while VFP is still at 20), there really isn't much change between the top 5 or 10 on the TIOBE index. Which is simply a fun way of saying "people stick with what they know".

Developers create a lot of little "snippets" that help them in a lot of different scenarios. Some of them evolve into larger tools; others turn into hidden gems that get shared among a small select few. (hmmm....SET TANGENT ON ....sounds like an interesting idea for a VFPX project - a snippet sharer - damn! don't they have that in VS? - I DIDN'T think of that when I was first writing this - why can't I think of something that VS DOESN'T have? - OK - SET TANGENT OFF - I do think we DO need an IntellisenseX manager that allows others to post useful Intellisense snippets) However, here's something I had to quickly build today and others likely have other ways of doing this but.... Problem: I wanted to quickly take the content of a small query subset table and dump it into a document (text) for easily review. (no, not everyone deals with XML) Update: YES -> you COULD do all the silly code I have down below here but Steve Black, guardian of all cool hidden t...

I've been reading KC almost since I started using an RSS (when I grabbed a bunch of the earliest MS bloggers and aggregated them) - and many of her posts are enlightening, some very informational (this is someone who has moved around MS quite a bit in different areas) and some just funny - like this one - KC on Exchange and Outlook : The power of words I guess we don't call it user interface anymore but rather User eXperience but it's still the same - how do people interact with your product. And as more resources get outsourced, this is an area where every developer/manager/user needs to be vigilant. Just as Jay Leno has his 99 cent store where recently they were wishing people Merry Hristmas and Happy Biryday, the quality bar on what words you use in your application needs to be raised. Where else did I hear this? Oh yeah, Jason Fried from 37 Signals in his SXSW session "What we've learned at 37 signals" - paraphrased: "before you do re-design, think...

According to Craig, Sedna Release Appears to be Imminent... This is, of course, great news for FoxPro developers as they have been waiting (im) patiently for it since October when they released SP2. I had noted it on an earlier post and asked around, finding out that Sedna got put behind VS2008 and SQL 2008 in the "release" queue. (Good to see that Craig is providing more details on it, although an updated EULA from Legal certainly isn't something I hoped to see - what new things could they have possibly put into it from June's CTP?) But since then, a few regression bugs were found in SP2. I can appreciate wanting to close the door on new VFP development - but with some of the fairly major bugs that were introduced, I hope that either: a) Sedna includes some fixes for it in the xBase apps (I'm not sure how that would work but if the report Preview engine controls how data is displayed, maybe it could) b) Sedna includes some hot-fix DLLs One can only hope. I am de...

Craig points out that Crystal has a new version and in his words, Crystal Reports 2008 -- Don't bother It's really sad to see companies start ending their support of technology that so many other companies have built their solutions around. Certainly you can't hope to have every technology around forever (I built my first Excel solution using DDE in Windows 2.1) but I find Crystal (er, Business Objects) sometimes makes decisions that are mind-boggingly dumb. Case in point, Crystal 10 had a nice easy to use Prompt for Parameters. In Crystal 11, this was reproduced by a more web-like interface. Sure, it looked great - but one problem: the customers I had were working in a secure environment where every app that wanted access to an internet page was prompted for security. Not only that, Crystal 11 also used JavaScript heavily - a solution that was disabled for most of the regular end-users. So while CR 11 may have had these great features, it caused more problems than it was ...

Cathy's posting a workaround for the bug she reported earlier with Visual FoxPro SP2 but the deafening silence from the Redmond camp is kind of annoying. We all looked forward to having a single solid release of VFP from which we could build solutions around - but one that wouldn't be introduce major new problems from previous versions. Cathy Pountney: Gotcha: Workaround for Data Group bug Now I suppose one could argue "why didn't this come up in the beta test" but this brings to bear the entire issue of a "public" vs. "private" beta. In my mind, with a Private Beta, users are far more likely to be critical of functionality and not bring on a list of "I want" items. Sure there will be a few - but most developers and users I know of in "private betas" are well-aware that by the time a product goes into "Beta" - the feature list has been locked down and now it's time to fix bugs. When you release a "public ...