Tony's Microsoft Access Blog

Version 1.82 of the Auto FE Updater available for download

I made some foolish, although thankfully minor, mistakes in the last version.   Mostly because of not testing things sufficiently. I was in a hurry to get the Check for Updates enhancements available although that’s not a good excuse.

See the Download page for details and to download the latest update.  Or if you’re running version 1.80 or newer then run the Check for Updates menu item.

It’s official: Download Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta

It’s official Download Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta

Office 2010 Beta downloadable by MSDN, Technet subscribers today

Office 2010 Beta downloadable by MSDN, Technet subscribers today Public download is expected shortly

Two new versions of the Auto FE Updater are available.

To download the latest version click Version 1.81 

However in this release I added the ability to check for updates.  Please download Version 1.80, test it, copy it to your server and then see if the logic to check for updates works.  Then click on the Check for Updates menu item and ensure the program downloads version 1.81 and that it works. Please email if this does or doesn't work. Or post a note on this blog entry.  Note that I will not give out your email address to anyone else.

Enhancements

- Stop the user from seeing the Access 2007 Security Warning - Certain content in this database has been disabled. 

Set Access 2007 Trusted Location=yes can now be specified in the INI file.

All Access 2007 trusted locations are stored in the registry under
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Access\Security\Trusted Locations\
The Auto FE Updater utility creates registry keys based on the name of the INI file and creates the recommended sub keys with the update date and description of the key for full traceability in the future.  

Note that it is a common assumption that you must use Location0, Location1, etc as a sub key which is what Access 2007 creates.  This is an assumption.  Which I made as well so you're not the only one.

- My Documents can now be specified in the MainApps entry

- Check for updates to the Auto FE Updater program.

- Added a button to place the CMD launcher line into the clipboard.  When I recently did some testing of the Place shortcut target line into clipboard the text didn’t insert well into Outlook.  Actually Outlook deleted some double quotes for reasons known only to the Outlook product group.  So using the CMD launcher line works much better.

- Minor bug fixes and better error messages

Consider joining the Auto FE Updater group on LinkedIn to discuss the product, give me feedback or let me know what features you would like to see.. Or email me directly or post a comment to this blog entry.

VB6: Class not registered … MSSTDFMT.DLL

I was getting the following message when I copied the VB6 exe of the Auto FE Updater to a clean system to test the logic to check for and download updates to the Auto FE updater on my website.

Class not registered.
You need the following file to be installed on your machine. MSSTDFMT.DLL.

There is no mention of that DLL anywhere in the VB6 source code.   No reference.  I've done a Windows word search on that folder and can't find any mention on that DLL.

Some more searching in various online forums stated it is used to verify that a number format is applied to a control.   Which is the first time I've ever done that and it happened to be on that particular form.  Now it turns out you can't clear the Format property of a VB6 = control so you have to delete and recreate it.  And all is well.

Cost me about ten hours of trying to understand this problem.   Frig.

It didn’t help that Google Groups searching of NNTP newsgroups is getting way, way worse than usual.

This posting has been blogged in the hopes that Google will treat this post with a little more respect than hundreds of online forums postings stating “You just need to install that DLL on the users PC.”  No, that is not a good enough answer for me as the Auto FE Updater is a drag and drop deploy to the server.

Access 2010 and Sharepoint discussion part 2

In this blog entry Access 2010 and Sharepoint discussion I mentioned an interesting discussion   A second thread titled Access 2010 with Sharepoint 2010 was also started with a lot of additional interesting discussion.   Keep checking back on these threads.  David Fenton, as expected, is asking some tough questions as are others.  I expect this discussion to go on for a while. 

Note that you might want to click on the Options button on the right hand side of the grey bar and choose to view the thread as a tree.

How to be a Problem Solver

How to be a Problem Solver   Or how to deal with an angry customer.  In particular note the over communicate concept even if it’s nothing more than we’re still working on it and here’s what we’ve done so far.

Access 2010 and Sharepoint discussion

Bob Alston, a comp.databases.ms-access newsgroup regular, asked about Access 2010.  A very interesting discussion with fellow access MVP Albert Kallal with his usual lengthy and informative postings has started.   Albert has posted a nice collection of current links to the Access product group blog as well as his own video.

Windows 7 development reorganized

Steve Sinofsky took over management of the Windows development team after Windows Vista.  He was in charge of Office development for a number of years prior.  I’ve been reading snippets over the past few years about how the development methodology of Windows 7 had changed.  And how Windows Vista development methodology had become too complex.

Now an interesting post by Larry Osterman, long time MS Windows OS developer mentions that.  Windows 7 Reflections…   In particular read the second last paragraph, the last long paragraph.

Let me also add that I have a great deal of respect for the Microsoft, and other successful, large team development efforts.  As you can imagine I mostly work by myself on apps which I have created.  With Access when you’re testing things you generally only need to test one or a few related forms or reports.   Once the correct data gets into the table you’re done.    You don’t need to worry about this bit of external code or that global variable.  After all, in my apps, global variables come from the global options table.

But with the Auto FE Updater it’s quite different.   There are a lot of global variables and a minor change over here can cause significant problems in an unexpected area over there.  Another way of putting this is I really need to figure out some means of doing thorough automated testing with all the possible options.  But I’m too busy right now.  (Yeah, I can just see some of you shaking your head and thinking “Tony, you’re gonna get real busy if you don’t take the time now.)

My Granite Fleet Manager is being used by a number of Hutterite colonies.  Good, intelligent people but they’re not that computer literate.  Indeed my app may have been the reason they’re seeing a computer for the first time.  Every once in a while I’ll get a phone call about a bizarre problem.  Once I realize what they did I realize that I should’ve put better error checking in that particular field.  What they did makes sense from their viewpoint.  It just hadn’t occurred to me that someone might do whatever it is they did.

As a result I can now understand why there’s generally a developer and a tester working together.  And the more “twisty minded” the tester the better.

P.S.  I added an Auto FE Updater group in LinkedIn.  Feel free to join the group or email me your irritants, pain points and suggestions.

resolver one – an insulting advertisement

While at StackOverflow I came across the following advertisement.

Note to resolver one advertising folks.  I like VBA.  There are improvements I’d like to see in the VBA editor but I do like VBA.

So kiss my ***

A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database

Ok, so this posting is not about Access but it is about a database/file with a lot of interesting historical information.

A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database