Relationship with DBI

Greetings DesignBais developers! Nebula Research and Development recently entered into an agreement with DesignBais International to provide Professional Services to and on behalf of DesignBais International, on an as-requested basis. In case you didn’t know me before, I just wanted to introduce myself.

DesignBais Tip – Image Location

Rather than putting application images directly into C:\db\images, put them in a folder under that. For example: C:\db\images\MyComp. This will help with upgrades, doing mass replacement of image files, etc. The default path used by DesignBais for images is images\ (with a trailing slash and relative to the base directory which is usually C:\db\. So, when referring to images, use […]

DesignBais Tip – Radio Buttons

Welcome to the first product usage tip for DesignBais on this blog! Radio buttons are mutually exclusive, round check boxes. Selecting one of them unsets all of the others. DesignBais does not yet natively support radio buttons, but we can simulate them using the image technique for toolbars and other controls (to be discussed in another tip).

The DesignBais Audience

DesignBais is a great product and perfectly suited to the Pick developer who doesn’t know or care about .NET, ODBC, sockets, ActiveX, Java, PHP, Perl, or any of these other tools that we discuss in public forums. I tend to say DesignBais is not for us, the geeks in the crowd, but that’s not entirely accurate.

What is DesignBais? Part 1

As many of you know I have been working with DesignBais for a while now. I’ve been impressed with it from the first time I saw it. This article contains excerpts from various forum postings I’ve made, and new material, to describe the product and explain my relationship with DesignBais International (DBI).

Technology choices: Windows, .NET, and mv.NET

This article discusses why I have chosen to work with Windows, the .NET Framework, and mv.NET for interfaces to MV DBMS applications. Feel free to disagree with my choices but maybe my reasoning will make sense to others who are trying to find their "home" amongst all of the available options.

Why mv.NET?

Connectivity into MV / Pick databases from object-oriented languages and mainstream products used to be difficult. These days it’s not tough at all, and highly affordable as well. There are many tools in our market that can do communications between MV and others, but I’ve settled on one tool that satisfies almost all of my needs for communications development. This […]

Separation of UI, rules, and data

I’m honored that one of the reasons why companies contract with me and Nebula R&D is because they want well organized code, not just functional code. Almost anyone can write functional code, that’s an exercise with syntax and debugging. A company tends to have more appreciation for code that’s truly "designed", not just "written", only after they’ve paid a lot […]

Application Virtualization

Our Pick / Multi-Value community has always prided itself on being able to run great multi-user applications in a powerful database with a small footprint.. The Pick model DBMS used to be called the Pick Operating system because we bundled all of these things into a package that was installable to make a piece of hardware an Application Engine. The […]

How many licenses do I need?

This is an in-depth explanation of how web clients consume licenses with a back-end MV DBMS. It might be too basic for some people but it should help to bring everyone up to a common level for discussions on this important topic.

Web Services from MV

A recent U2 forum inquiry asks about using the SoapRequest functions in BASIC to make a Web Service Client call via SOAP. I think it’s inefficient to do things like this directly to/from MV DBMS platforms.

AntiVirus Software and D3NT Files

I was just installing Norton AntiVirus 2006 from Symantec, and as I was setting up the Exclusion list of files to not scan I figured I’d share my list with you.

Linux and .NET

I’m starting to get more questions about .NET with Linux, using ASP.NET with Apache, writing Web Services in C# with Mono, etc. I’m providing some excerpts and paraphrasing here of recent exchanges I’ve had with prospects and clients.

Schema for Software

I’d like you to think a moment about a recurring pattern of chaos, definition, and discovery. In each of the following instances there was a perceived sense of chaos which prompted people to develop document definitions. From those definitions technologies have been developed to allow discovery, sorting, and many new applications to facilitate searching and data acquisition.

C# Snippets for VS2005

If you’re new to Visual Studio you’ll eventually find out about snippets, think they’re cool, and sigh at all of the code that you used to cut and paste manually. If you use C# you’ll suddenly feel cheated when you see how many snippets are in VB.NET and how few are in C#. Here’s the cure.

Ajax links galore

Holy cow! I forgot to post the initial list of Ajax links! Here they are, and man are there a lot of um! I will be using thes for my research and will reference them in blog entries.

Ajax solutions being researched

So far the only sources I’m investigating are Microsoft Atlas and Telerik r.a.d. Controls. Infragistics has also had Ajax components for a while. See notes below for ComponentOne as well.

It’s not just a web page anymore

I’m increasingly asked to build more sophisticated web interfaces which begin to approach the interactive capabilities of a thick client. Satisfying these requests is getting much more difficult.