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1. Comment - Windows 98, Me Support to End in July

   (Apr 12, 2006 - 3:20 AM)

   A PC with preloaded Windows XP can be purchased these days for $300 - $400. If you can't afford to pay $300 every couple of years to stay current with your hardware and OS, you'd best spend this precious time collecting your welfare check, rather than moaning about evil MS on this forum.

2. Comment - Microsoft Announces New Office Tools

   (Dec 13, 2002 - 7:30 PM)

   I've been at a couple of large corporations now that have used so-called "Office Applications" as ways to leverage corporate data. I'm not too crazy in general about desktop apps for corporations because of the old DLL hell scenario. But slowly but surely the .NET self-describing assembly approach will help improve that (yes it will take years to get there). A couple of examples of what I saw in Office automation that seemed pretty cool were:
   
   They distributed an Access app to the managers that dug Access that let them push data they'd gotten from the field into the corp database. Then a nightly app pulled data from the database and built an Excel workbook out of it, workbook with its own buttons that ran macros that gen'd reports and massaged the data. Then using CDO they emailed the workbooks to B-to-B customers across the globe. These guys that received the mailed workbooks were extatic about getting the latest and greatest data local and in a form they could work with.
   
   In another Office Automation app, a corp had a bunch of legal documents that were required with each new customer relationship, tons of docs some of which were huge. Depending on the customer, the group of docs would differ but each individual type of doc wouldn't change much, just certain customer info and certain clauses that were relevant or weren't relevant. So a Word application was created. It pulled the metadata about the customers from SQL server and then drove Word to create the correct packet of documents with the correct customer-specific data inserted into the templates.
   
   Maybe there's a better way to do this stuff, but damn, it sure seemed like Office automation met their requirements well. So if you can buy off on the value of that sort of application for corporations, the next question is should the language that enables that stuff basically freeze at the 1999 level (VBA/VB6) or should it move forwards into full object orientation and all the other benefits provided by .NET? I think it's great that Microsoft will .NET-enable their office suite.