Today I received an email advising me “Congratulations! You have been selected for the Network Solutions Gold VIP Program” Now I get a bunch of messages from Network Solutions because a long time ago I chose them as my registrar. I usually just save these to my Outlook Network Solutions folder and move on. This time my wife was in the room and I chuckled ......

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In my early development days, I used Microsoft Access for building databases. It made things easy since I only needed to package the database with the installation package so my clients would have access to it. When we began the development of a new package in Visual Studio .NET I decided to use SQL Server Express. It was free and provided good tools ......

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A couple of days ago I decided to reinstall the latest Microsoft Developer Training Kits. One of those kits was the Windows Azure Training Kit. It turned out to be a web matrix install that seemed to take forever. More importantly it installed SQL Server 2012 for me. It may have prompted me but I don’t remember but once installed I entered a couple ......

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Intuit Partner Platform and Data Access I’m going to make some assumptions that will cover a lot of folks developing applications to work with QuickBooks. 1. You are running a copy of QuickBooks on your development machine. 2. You are running Visual Studio 2010 as your development environment of choice. 3. You have some flavor of Microsoft LightSwitch ......

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Timothy recently posted “Microsoft Shows Off Radical New UI, Could Be Used In Windows 8” on Slashdot. I took such grave exception to his post that I found it necessary to my senses to write this blog. We need to go back many years to the days of hand cranked calculators and early main frame computers. These devices had singular purposes – they were ......

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If you've ever looked at a raw XML file - even a very simple one - you'll understand. XML files are nearly impossible to read in raw format. That's where various tools come in and there are a bunch of them including some very simple tools. If, however, you need some horsepower one of the best tools on the planet is LiquidXML! LiquidXML is a developer's ......

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I've spent time the last few month checking out much of the latest in code generation tools. Again one of the most complete and comprehensive is Iron Speed Designer - now in version 7.1. I had the good fortune to talk for about a half hour with Alan Fisher of Iron Speed and I will be adding content here in the next weeks. Hopefully I can also present ......

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I've spent what seems like weeks attempting to set up remote access for SQL Server 2008. Up to recently my database access was alway against a local instance but I now have two servers and I want to work from my local machine using databases on my remote server. I finally got it working. If you need to know how I've done a big page at: http://videotutors.net/SQLS... ......

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For Immediate Release Iron Speed, Inc. Kelly Fisher +1 (408) 228-3436 kfisher@ironspeed.com http://www.ironspeed.com Iron Speed Version 7.0 Generates SharePoint Applications New! Support for Microsoft SharePoint speeds application generation and deployment San Jose, CA – June 8, 2010. Software development tools-maker Iron Speed, Inc. released Iron Speed ......

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I’ve been at this programming business longer than I would like to admit. For that reason I am always looking for new training resources as anyone in this business knows all too well. I’ve looked at AppDev (way too expensive for my meager budget), LearnVisualStudio (I have a lifetime subscription), and several others. What appears to be a new version ......

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