TechEd has sold out. I also noticed this a few days ago, but Kate’s blog post was too funny to pass up.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Baseball fever that is. I’m looking at the cover of the May issue that arrived today and having a good laugh at the baseball theme that runs through the titles of all of the articles on the cover. Very silly, you guys!!

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I have a client with one last holdout FoxPro 2.6 application. It manages all of their incredibly complex billing and is a work of art and works beautifully and someday we will upgrade it, not to make it better, but just because we will have to. But for now, just accept that fact and move on. 🙂

The woman who does the invoicing noticed an odd inconsistency that did not affect billing but a payroll report that was missing one person’s 3 hour stint for a particular day  – one of 3 rows that made up one guy’s particular day.

That report is created by a union of two queries. The first picks up all the data, the second picks up any body who didn’t have any hours that week (10 maybe 15 extra). I looked and looked at this then broke the queries into two. The record was there. Ran the queries with the union, the record was gone and the row count was off by one.

I have been fiddling with this all morning (it’s a disease, what can I say?) and there is no rhyme or reason for it. So I just bagged the union and did two queries and appended the results to each other.

But, no complaints. We are all ecstatic that this 8 year old program (which gets tweaked here and there from time to time) still works on the new computers and is great. Thanks to all who are responsible for that!!

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Someone who sat in on my C# for VB programmers session at Code Camp emailed with a little problem. DataSet.Table(“myTable”) was throwing the error

Error: ‘System.Data.DataSet.Tables’ denotes a ‘property’ where a ‘method’ was expected

It is such a common mistake we VB people make in C# because those parens are just totally second nature to us! Even I had to think about it a minute before I saw the problem! It’s

DataSet.Table[“myTable“]

The funny thing was seeing a C# programmer complaining that in VB, everything is parens and it makes it hard to tell if we are referring to a parameter or an element, making a method call or getting info out of an array/collection. Great perspective!

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I am likely one of many many people who are struggling with this decision.

PDC and the MVP Summit are 2 weeks apart, both on the west coast. This is really frustrating.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Interesting news! By way of Roman Rehak

http://www.AcehAid.org

I saw Paschal’s MVP post and the follow up conversation about it. I have been mulling this over and decided to comment on it as well. When I read the post I thought that Paschal was asking “what about Ireland?” and throwing caution to the wind regarding how he is perceived. To me, that matches up pretty well with his claim that he doesn’t want to be an MVP. His message, as I read it, was “not even one MVP in all of Ireland? Hello?”. And he said it even if it meant that, by making a stink about it, he looked, well, like a bit of a stinker.

I understand that message. I have been known to ping MVP leads about some people from Vermont that I wanted to make sure they were aware of. I was delighted to meet up with another Vermont geek at the MVP summit last year! And this is just a little state, not an entire country.

One of the issues for the MVP leads is that people need to get on their radar in order to be considered. Sometimes it takes someone else to make that happen. And even then, there are generally more qualified people than the numbers they are allowed to award to.

So, Paschal and I have different methods. I happen to know some of the leads so I can leverage those connections. He has his blog which definitely gets read, so that’s the route he takes. How about use the blog a little further – like have a category: “People I think should be on the MVP radar” – or something like that.

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I guess they got a little tiresome only because there were so many but it was fun how many people put together some really creative April Fool’s jokes. Also it made it hard to post anything that was serious because who would believe it?

The best was Matt Hawley who has been blogging about his move to go work for Microsoft over the past few weeks. Yesterday he blogged – haha that was all an April Fool’s joke, which kind of made any one reading those posts scratch their heads, wondering – what the heck is funny about that? It turned outo that the joke WAS on us, because he really is going to Microsoft. Good one, Matt.

My posting about the VB keywords The and A, was actually a group effort by a bunch of VB people: myself, Kathleen Dollard, Rocky Lhotka, Jackie Goldstein and Billy Hollis. Obviously a spoof. But I thought everyone’s contributions were pretty clever and funny. Hardly anyone memed it though, oh well.

The funny thing about that post was that it was so obviously a joke, however my own comments made people think that I didn’t get it was a joke! As if I found the press release somewhere else and was upset about it. Ha ha. So I did get you! Nah nah nah. And the other funny thing that happened, was that Kathleen and I (who love each other, really, we do!) had a little unplanned cat fight on our blogs. So in case that worried anyone, no need – we were giggling about it. She’s not off her rocker. But she did get some good digs in on me, didn’t she. Hmmmmmm….

Anyway, it was fun to do. I have been planning that since the MVP summit last  year.

http://www.AcehAid.org

[this was all part of our April Fool’s gag. I love Kathleen and don’t think she’s gone off her rocker]

I have known Kathleen for many years and consider her a friend. BUt Kathleen does tend to get a little, ummm, passionate about VB. (understatement). I just don’t know where she is going with this?!

http://www.AcehAid.org