In my last blog I mentioned there really isn’t such a thing as "The Linux Desktop". The topic was mentioned in a forum today so I thought I’d post a follow-up with some related thoughts and hallucinations - you can decide which is which. I apologize if this posting isn’t organized very well. I’m blasting this one out quickly and thoughts don’t always come in nicely organized paragraphs. 
Dawn made a comment in comp.databases.pick: "I like to say that "it takes hard work to make software simple". That triggers a thought: as software evolves and user expectations increase it takes a lot more work to keep it simple. I don’t think some of my colleagues have embraced this concept.
We’ve been putting together an ASP.NET starter kit which may or may not be productized. It’s a Visual Studio solution / template which includes the following features.
As I’m sitting here tidying up some CSS in a new ASP.NET app, I thought I’d provide a couple tips that I’ve found to be helpful.
One of the most common inquiries we see in MV forums involves exchanging data between the MV DBMS and relational databases. In this multi-part series over the next couple weeks, I’ll describe ways to get data flowing in both directions without using platform-specific ODBC tools.
This Part 1 is just an introduction and I’ll start describing some details in Part 2. I expect a new segment on this every 4 days or so, maybe with other blog postings in between.
Questions frequently arise in forums about how FlashBASIC works. So I thought I’d summarize it here.
First, a primer on compilation and object code in general
A common statement that comes up in forums and other discussions about software is "the vendor should have put feature X into their product". There is no clear line where vendor responsibility "ends".
A question came up in comp.databases.pick that asked how we could use a pre-defined set of values in a D3 query. For example: SORT CUSTOMERS WITH STATE "AZ" "CA" "NM" "OR" … but getting the state codes dynamically. Sure, we can do that, using shell variables.
In this world of "Open Source" it’s amazing how many software offerings completely die because the one author on the planet that cared about the code has lost interest and no one else seems willing to maintain it. The concepts behind OSS go beyond software toward philosphy and changes in the way we work. And unless people subscribe to these principles I don’t think the model can continue to work effectively, if at all.
People frequently ask about PrintWizard, how it works, what they can do with it, etc. As time permits I’ll start posting some info here about how to use it. Unfortunately this won’t start at the beginning like a tutorial. I’m just going to post some nice tips as I happen to think about them. In this first tip I’ll show you one way to populate a form - and how to use an image as a form overlay rather than using pre-printed forms.