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If you’ve ever worked with Access XP or earlier in combination with SourceSafe 6 and are now using Access 2003, you might miss the SourceSafe capabilities in Access. Out of the box, Access 2003 did not support putting your Access stuff in Sourcesafe. Microsoft has now released an Access 2003 add-in for this! So, if you would like your Access 2003 program to be taken into source code control: it now can.

The hype surrounding Visual Studio 2005 almost makes you not notice all the other upcoming Microsoft developer products which will accompany VS2K5. One of these products is the new source code control system. This January at the ASP.NET 2.0 roadshow in Amsterdam, Scott Guthrie (leading engineer on the ASP.NET 2.0 team) described the new source code control system as ‘SourceSafe done right’. Microsoft will be delivering Team Foundation which not only will allow you to add source control to your solutions, but also makes it easier to track work items as their status is available at all time.

Brad Abrams posted the internal MS Coding guidelines on his blog earlier this year. Interesting reading stuff! I tested my own code against these guidelines. I think I would pass…. 😉

Questa posted a very usefull piece of code… It’s possible to convert a string representation of an enum back to an enum! private enum MyEnumeration { FooBar, Foo, Bar } ... MyEnum foo = MyEnum.Foo; foobar = foo.ToString(); MyEnum bar = (MyEnum)Enum.Parse(typeof(MyEnum), foobar); At the end of this code, the variable bar has the MyEnum value Foo, just the way it’s supposed to be…

Actually, the cause for this error is very small and simple. But because the error doesn’t clearly state what’s wrong and there’s not a lot to be found about this, I’ll post it here anyway… Otherwise, you might be looking for this for a while, while it’s so easy! When you are loading an assembly using reflection and you want to call a method from the class that’s in the loaded assembly, you might get the error Object does not match target type.

After promising you a post on using delegates to create events several times, I’m now using my break to post it. Because it will be a while if I wait until I can find the time… 😉 As I mentioned earlier a delegate can be seen as an interface for a method. Because you don’t know what the method that will handle an event on your user control will look like, delegates are a great way to provide your user control with events.

Stored Procedures rule, because they facilitate manipulating the dataset you get from a database or the way you are inserting or deleting data in a database without changing your application. Or your business layer for that matter. But you can’t always use stored procedures for the actions you would like your application to take. Or maybe your database doesn’t support stored procedures. In that case it’s back to queries for you!

They stole my leather jacket this weekend, containing my wallet and my keys. Assholes. First thing I learned as a kid: leave other people’s stuff alone! Why is it some people simply don’t have the decency to work for the things they want? I do… Just like all of my friends. And although you might not be able to buy everything you like, it feels pretty good when you are, for instance, finally able to order the phone you’ve wanted for months.

My new phone is on the way! I ordered it yesterday, and faxed all of the necessary info today. So if all goes well, I’ll be calling you using this baby next week! This is the MDA III, provided by T-Mobile. It’s actually the QTek 9090, but T-Mobile placed their own logo on it. It has integrated wireless networking, bluetooth, and many more! I could even develop my own software for it.

Just a quick personal update: my carchoice has been approved and the car is currently on it’s way. Just a few more weeks… I sold my bike, but will be looking for another one! we had a wedding last friday, very good party! the company party was great! the bottom shelve of the cupboard in our kitchen broke: most of our muds and scales have crashed… 🙁 tonight we’re having a company yearmeeting!

All I wanted to do was check if my application was running in debug-mode or in release-mode. Searching MSDN library and Google (groups) both did not deliver the solution to me. I was about to let go when, out of the blue, a webpage showed up in my browser telling me the following: Visual Studio automatically generates a pre-processor directive called DEBUG which is linked to the mode you run your application in.

It’s almost like playing Need for Speed: “Please select your car.” But this time it was real! Last saturday I had two testdrives and I selected my future car. It is going to be the Citroën C4. I ordered it today and, when all goes well, I’ll be receiving it within just a few weeks! That is if my director accepts the order. I can hardly wait ….