Free promotions, how strange... and kinda desparate sounding...
Down here in NZ I received a postcard 'invitation' to the visual studio.net product release, which I can be privileged to attend at the cost of $149 (plus 12.5% GST).
Now I may have a distorted view of the universe, from working on a Microsoft development platform for too long, but shouldn't MS be offering incentives for developers to take up their new dev tools ? Maybe a free copy of VS.NET here & there ? So we can develop applications that require our clients to purchase MS licenses ?
No, they can give away massive $$$ to promote the OS of the future, but developers should PAY THEM to sit in a big room and hear about new products that we could buy off them. Altho I was not rushing to take up.NET to start with, this slipped the gear lever into reverse for me.
oh, and my home desktop is KDE, so even a free copy of XP ain't getting near my hardware:)
Its a little late to be adding to this, but I recently took it upon myself to learn PHP for some voluntary support of a club site...
I set up PHP running under the MS Personal Web Server, and using MySql, to develop some relatively simple members pages, data forms etc, to be transferred to a site running on a Linux server. I was impressed with the relative ease of installing & configuring it all.
After having used ASP on IIS for quite some time, I found PHP has much in common with ASP in terms of structure & use. You should expect an experienced ASP person to pick up PHP in no time at all (provided they know how to read the manual). I enjoyed learning & applying PHP, just for the change. Just try it, you will like it, once you get the config file sorted out:)
The simplest answer for ms/outlook is to change the default action associated with script files to 'edit' instead of 'open'. This solves the problem of all the people in your company who automatically double-click on attachments in outlook (they will come asking you why Notepad pops up with strange code in it, but who cares about that ?).
To achieve this, email this out in an attachment file with a vbs extension on it (this is not self-replicating and should be mostly harmless):
On Error Resume Next
Set WS = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
FExtn = Array(".JS", ".JSE", ".VBE", ".VBS", ".WSF")
FUpr =Ubound(FExtn)
For FIdx =0 to FUpr
SetDefault(FIdx)
Next
Function SetDefault(Idx)
FAssoc = WS.RegRead("HKCR\" & FExtn(Idx) & "\")
If FAssoc <> "" Then
FDefault = WS.RegRead("HKCR\" & FAssoc & "\Shell\")
If trim(lcase(FDefault)) <> "edit" Then
WS.RegWrite "HKCR\" & FAssoc & "\Shell\","Edit"
End If
End If
End Function
I resisted the temptation to add a function here for opening the address book and forwarding the attachment onwards. As I said above, it is not self-replicating, and will only be executed by anybody who has scripting enabled in their outlook. Double-click on this attachment in outlook once, and most of those childish script attachments will be disabled from unintentional execution in the future.
Note: you will then need to save script files to disk and right-click on them to select the 'open' option if you actually want to run the script instead of view its source code.
Note2: if you do not have write-access to your registry I guess nothing will happen. Didnt say it was perfect.
What if a process happily running sans gui from the command line, also had an interface in something like XSLT or somesuch, that allowed an interacting gui entity to access data retrieval sources (say query a percentage value for a progress-bar display, in its simplest mode) and data input channels (if the interface defined one or more file name or list 'properties', these could be populated from drop-downs or file browser features etc from the gui).
Im taking a far more simplistic approach to this than I would dare to take with any working specification I would have to program from, but the OO aspect is what is important in making sure X gui's dont all slowly turn into Windows.
The process objects public interface could be extremely simple, with hooks for adding your own complexity, as programmers must, but keeping to the basic rules of any good command line centric process or application.
The gui engine just needs to serve out objects, either simple default types for basic stuff or customised & specialised objects for the tougher stains, which could either read the interface definition and build a gui interface on the fly, or alternatively pull up a specialised interface from the 'library' as such when it is called for.
Slashdot Mirror
What NASA actually need to do is leak some info to Bush about their latest Mars infra-red sweeps having picked up hidden terrorist bases.
:)
Bush would then redirect his anti-terrorist budget towards getting troops and nukes over there as fast as possible.
Just a thought
Free promotions, how strange... and kinda desparate sounding...
.net product release, which I can be privileged to attend at the cost of $149 (plus 12.5% GST).
.NET to start with, this slipped the gear lever into reverse for me.
:)
Down here in NZ I received a postcard 'invitation' to the visual studio
Now I may have a distorted view of the universe, from working on a Microsoft development platform for too long, but shouldn't MS be offering incentives for developers to take up their new dev tools ? Maybe a free copy of VS.NET here & there ? So we can develop applications that require our clients to purchase MS licenses ?
No, they can give away massive $$$ to promote the OS of the future, but developers should PAY THEM to sit in a big room and hear about new products that we could buy off them. Altho I was not rushing to take up
oh, and my home desktop is KDE, so even a free copy of XP ain't getting near my hardware
LesF
Its a little late to be adding to this, but I recently took it upon myself to learn PHP for some voluntary support of a club site...
I set up PHP running under the MS Personal Web Server, and using MySql, to develop some relatively simple members pages, data forms etc, to be transferred to a site running on a Linux server. I was impressed with the relative ease of installing & configuring it all.
After having used ASP on IIS for quite some time, I found PHP has much in common with ASP in terms of structure & use. You should expect an experienced ASP person to pick up PHP in no time at all (provided they know how to read the manual). I enjoyed learning & applying PHP, just for the change. Just try it, you will like it, once you get the config file sorted out :)
LesF
To achieve this, email this out in an attachment file with a vbs extension on it (this is not self-replicating and should be mostly harmless):
I resisted the temptation to add a function here for opening the address book and forwarding the attachment onwards. As I said above, it is not self-replicating, and will only be executed by anybody who has scripting enabled in their outlook. Double-click on this attachment in outlook once, and most of those childish script attachments will be disabled from unintentional execution in the future.
Note: you will then need to save script files to disk and right-click on them to select the 'open' option if you actually want to run the script instead of view its source code.
Note2: if you do not have write-access to your registry I guess nothing will happen. Didnt say it was perfect.
LesF
What if a process happily running sans gui from the command line, also had an interface in something like XSLT or somesuch, that allowed an interacting gui entity to access data retrieval sources (say query a percentage value for a progress-bar display, in its simplest mode) and data input channels (if the interface defined one or more file name or list 'properties', these could be populated from drop-downs or file browser features etc from the gui).
:)
Im taking a far more simplistic approach to this than I would dare to take with any working specification I would have to program from, but the OO aspect is what is important in making sure X gui's dont all slowly turn into Windows.
The process objects public interface could be extremely simple, with hooks for adding your own complexity, as programmers must, but keeping to the basic rules of any good command line centric process or application.
The gui engine just needs to serve out objects, either simple default types for basic stuff or customised & specialised objects for the tougher stains, which could either read the interface definition and build a gui interface on the fly, or alternatively pull up a specialised interface from the 'library' as such when it is called for.
Well it could work, anyway