Tony's Microsoft Access Blog

Version 1.82 of the Auto FE Updater available for download

Tony — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:34:09 GMT

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

Tony — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:22:08 GMT

It’s official Download Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta

Office 2010 Beta downloadable by MSDN, Technet subscribers today

Tony — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:25:20 GMT

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

Two new versions of the Auto FE Updater are available.

Tony — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 06:50:36 GMT

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

Tony — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:33:41 GMT

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

Tony — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:56:28 GMT

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

Tony — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:53:57 GMT

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

Tony — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:02:22 GMT

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

Tony — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:02:30 GMT

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

Tony — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:03:11 GMT

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

Tony — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:06:06 GMT

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

Added an Initial User Install page to the Auto FE Updater site

Tony — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:06:09 GMT

I added an Initial User Install page to the Auto FE Updater web site.

If you use a different method of setting up initial startup for your users please let me know.

Also please let me know if you managed to figure out how to email a file share URL so Outlook doesn’t mangle it. <sigh> Either I’m dumb or Outlook is being way to frigging helpful.

Jackcess is a pure Java library for reading from and writing to MS Access databases.

Tony — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:51:45 GMT

I just came across this interesting Open Source project - Jackcess is a pure Java library for reading from and writing to MS Access databases. Also read the FAQ. Also note the link to MDB Tools which hasn’t been updated since 2004.

Jet Engine History

Tony — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:01:48 GMT

A question started a bit of digging and poking about. I’ve always been interested in the history of Access and Jet and the code names used way back when such as Cirrus. The Wiki Microsoft Jet Database Engine article had a footnote referencing a page titled Jet Engine: History

Regretfully all the links mentioned on that page no longer work. Although some of the MS white papers mentioned might still be available by digging.

Which reminds me. There are two versions of the Microsoft Jet Database Engine Programmer's Guide. I have the first edition which is the one with the light blue cloud cover which was sort of the theme of Windows 95. I should purchase the second edition which has a white cover just to ensure it’s part of my collection.

And I should spend a few minutes rereading the table of contents just to refresh my memory so if I ever need some information I’ll at least know that it’s available.

Office DevCon in Australia

Tony — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:35:08 GMT

For those of you who don't know, Office DevCon (http://www.officedevcon.com.au) is the largest and most popular annual community-driven conference in the southern hemisphere. It allows Microsoft Office developers and power users to come together in one location to hear expert speakers from around the world present on a wide range of Microsoft Office-related topics.

Over 2 days, you will hear in-depth presentations on advanced Office System technologies for Office 2003 and 2007, and 2010 (the next version), including Word, Access, Excel, SharePoint, Groove, and InfoPath. In essence, we are launching Office 2010 in Australia, so if you want to get up close and personal with Office 2010, you'll see it here first!

This year, the conference will be held at the University of Queensland (St. Lucia campus) over the weekend 31st October-1st November 2009. The conference is FREE to attend, but to allow the organizers to plan resources, please register at http://www.officedevcon.com.au/2009/register.htm.

We'd love to see you there. This only happens once a year, so don't miss out.

Regards,
Graham R Seach
Microsoft Access MVP & Conference Organizer

Sites pulling sneaky Flash cookie-snoop

Tony — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 02:13:15 GMT

“What's far less well known is that Adobe Flash software also features cookies that can be used in much the same way as HTTP cookies. Flash cookies can be used for storing the volume level of a Flash video but the technology can also be used as "secondary, redundant unique identifiers that enable advertisers to circumvent user preferences and self-help", the academics warn.

A significant percentage of websites including federal government sites use this Flash-based technology to track users, the researchers discovered. The technology is sometimes used as a means to "undelete" the information in browser-based cookies that a user might have thought they had cleared from their system when they deleted their browsing history, the academics explain.”

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/19/flash_cookies/

More info and a script here Online Privacy Tips

Added - Jim Mack informed me of the CCleaner (apparently the first C is short for cr*p) that cleans those up. I cleaned my system using the above mentioned script an hour or two ago and since found three flash cookies from a website ytimg.com for which no web page exists but is apparently for YouTube. Which makes sense as I had indeed visited YouTube in there.

Is Nothing

Tony — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:09:04 GMT

I’m working on some largish updates to the Auto FE Updater and I wanted to ensure that the new routine which logs errors would properly handle the situation if there were errors in the error logging routine. A great deal of searching a dimly remembered discussion brought me to fellow Access MVP Dirk GoldGar’s posting on this topic. How to know when a Connection or Recordset is open in Programming

If Not rs Is Nothing Then
    rs.Close: Set rs = Nothing
End If
If Not gblLogdb Is Nothing Then _
    gblLogdb.Close
MsgBox "The following error occurred in procedure Log_NewSession of Module Log" & vbCrLf & vbCrLf & _
    Err.Description & vbCrLf & vbCrLf & Command()

Note that the standard error handling routine, including the sub/function name and module name is created by MZTools. An excellent free utility which I use all the time.

I was rather startled. This isn’t even documented in Access 97 help. Allen Browne has a page on this general topic - Nothing? Empty? Missing? Null?

A new version of the Auto FE Updater is available – 1.79

Tony — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 06:15:47 GMT

Added ShortCutComment to INI file for the user to see when hovering over a shortcut.
Fixed bug where if creating both a Program Files shortcut with a folder and a desktop shortcut the utility would attempt to add the shortcut to a folder to the desktop
- Thanks to Noel Mann of New Zealand for the ShortCutComment suggestion and the above bug report
Utility will now correct shortcut icon where the user has updated that field or the admin wants to change them.
Fixed various minor bugs and created better error messages mostly in the area of shortcut handling

Visit the Auto Fe Updater site to download or click here.

Website Updates - Microsoft Access Email FAQ - CDO aka CDONTS

Tony — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:06:12 GMT

Added the following to the Microsoft Access Email FAQ - CDO aka CDONTS web page.

Collaboration Data Objects, version 1.2.1
Beginning in Exchange Server 2007 and Outlook 2007, CDO 1.2.1 will no longer be provided as a part of the install of the product. As a result, there is functionality missing that many applications depend upon. CDO 1.2.1 is a package providing access to Outlook-compatible objects through a COM-based API.

Microsoft Exchange Server MAPI Client and Collaboration Data Objects 1.2.1
Starting with Exchange 2007, neither the Messaging API (MAPI) client libraries nor CDO 1.2.1 are provided as a part of the base product installation. As a result, there is functionality missing that many applications depend on. Microsoft Exchange MAPI and CDO 1.2.1 provide access to these APIs

InStrRev

Tony — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:32:04 GMT

I’ll be darned. I had no idea InStrRev existed in VBA code. It is new in Access 2000 so it’s been around for nine years.

I had to build this function myself in A2.0 or A97 to get the file name from a string which had the path and file. The code needed to find the right most occurrence of “\” back slash. I’ve been happily using my function ever since.

I actually learned something new about Access this year. <smile>