Tony's Microsoft Access Blog

Another method of getting the lengthy reference description

In my blog posting Fetching the reference description I was told that adding a reference to Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications Extensibility 5.3 and some code would give you the lengthy reference text.   Turns out though you don’t need the VBA Extensibility reference if you Dim refIDE as an object.   The following code works quite nicely.

Sub DebugPrintReferencesIDE()

Dim refIDE As Object

    For Each refIDE In Access.Application.VBE.ActiveVBProject.References
        Debug.Print IIf(refIDE.IsBroken, "Broken ", "") & _
             refIDE.Name & " " & vbTab & refIDE.Major & "." & refIDE.Minor & vbTab & _
             refIDE.Description & vbCrLf & vbTab & vbTab & vbTab & vbTab & refIDE.FullPath
    Next refIDE

End Sub

P.S.  I have no idea why I tried this other than I wanted to use this without a reference and Dimming refIDE as an object was the first thing to do.   I was quite surprised when the code actually worked.

Painless hard drive upgrade

Given the Access 2010 beta and the requirement for more Virtual PC sessions and such my 150 Gb hard drive in my laptop was getting too small.    So I purchased a 7200 RPM 500 Gb hard drive, downloaded Acronis True Image Home 11 and installed it. 

I have a $25 tool that has a hard drive power supply and a USB connector at one end and SATA and IDE connectors at the other end.    I hooked up the new hard drive to the tool and told True Image Home to clone the hard drive.   And I went to bed.

When I got up the screen told me the hard drive was successfully cloned.   It powered off the laptop.  I switched hard drives and now I have 323 Gb free.     Ahhhh, I feel much less constipated now.   So the tool worked quite painlessly.

Disclaimer:  As an MVP we get free software offers such as this one.  We are asked to write about our experiences.   I can assure you though that if I had something bad to say I would’ve typed it.  Indeed I once did find something that just didn’t make sense to me and I emailed Acronis appropriately.  

Also two weeks ago I upgraded the memory in my laptop to 2.5 Gb as well.   So I’m set for a bit.

Office 2010: Tech Preview now, free Web apps in August

Lots of news today on Office 2010.   Search away.

Leaked: newer Office 2010 Technical Preview build

Office 2010: Tech Preview now, free Web apps in August

According to the above article OneNote is now part of all Office editions.  OneNote is an excellent program for tracking all the random information that really has no specific place

Office 2010: The Movie (trailer)

Official website: Office 2010: The Movie   The Youtube video

Note Clippy at 40 seconds in.  <giggle>

No screen shots of course.

Google has screwed up yet again

So I go to do my favourite technical question search method which involves searching just the microsoft.public.access newsgroups and it totally fails.  Worked just fine a few days ago.

Start at groups.google.com and enter your search term.  For example "access books vba" but without the double quotes.  

Now if you just click on Search Groups you get many, many useless, duplicate hits.   The problem is that there are many web sites out there mirroring the NNTP Usenet and Microsoft newsgroups.   All so they can sell Google advertising.  

I should note that there are a few genuine online forums such as Utter Access and, think, the Access World forums.   However the vast majority are bottom feeding, scum suckers whose only interest is advertising revenue.

So as to limit the search just to the Microsoft newsgroups I would then click on Advanced Search go down to the Group name field and enter microsoft.public.access.*  

And that doesn't find any hits.  I *KNOW* a few days ago this worked just fine. 

So Google has screwed up the NNTP newsgroup search interface yet again.    Ahh, for the good old days of dejanews.com and deja.com.    They did only one thing and did it well.