Jackie Goldstein's Weblog

Check out the growing set of video and text interviews with leading VB developers at the I’m A VB site.   You can find my interview at Jackie VB.

I came cross this video on Antonio Chagoury.

It is one of those “Very funny, but painfully true” videos that depicts how ridiculous it would be if the same negotiating tactics used with software vendors were used in other scenarios.

How many of you deal with these tactics on a regular basis? 
How do you respond to them?

While we try to be flexible and “creative”, we normally do expect to get paid not only for our time, but also our expertise.  I also know how much (actually, how little) I can rely on promises of future deals and/or compensation. If potential clients can’t appreciate what we bring to the table, and how much they need to pay for it, then I don’t want them as a client…

We have just posted a very cool video showing off some of the work we have been doing with Voice Recognition.

At Renaissance, we try to allocate time for our developers to explore new tools and technologies that are not necessarily related to their current projects. This speech application is the result of one such project developed by Kim Major (http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/kim).

The video (http://www.renaissance.co.il/VSSpeech.aspx) offers a glimpse of our thinking and early implementation of extending Microsoft Visual Studio to allow programmers to write code in C# or VB.NET using mostly speech recognition. We believe that this unique approach could be a real boon for handicapped programmers, temporary suffers of RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury), or programmers who just want to program while lying on the beach.

This is a work in progress and we would very much like to hear your comments and feedback either over here or at speech@renaissance.co.il.

A very interesting interview with Steve Balmer in yesterday’s New York Times.  Particularly good advice on how he now likes to run meetings, which is applicable to technical meetings as well.

The April 2009 edition of the Renaissance Computer Systems Ltd. newsletter is now available at  http://www.renaissance.co.il/newsletters/NewsApr09.pdf

In this Newsletter:
Renaissance sponsors Internet and Mobile Boot Camp
Speaking of Startups…
Tools, Technologies, and Techniques – Visual Studio Database Edition (“Data Dude”)
On the Lighter Side - Everything's amazing, nobody's happy

UPDATE #2:  Thanks to the comment by Tony, making 2 simple changes to the code eliminates the need for step (3) below.

I’ve commented out the line

Set oOutlookApp = GetObject(, "Outlook.Application")

and changed

Set olNS = oOutlookApp.GetNamespace("MAPI")

               to

' By following change eliminates the security access prompts!
'Set olNS = oOutlookApp.GetNamespace("MAPI")
Set olNS = ThisOutlookSession.GetNamespace("MAPI")

UPDATE: A critical line of code seems to have fallen off when I copied the code to the original post – I have added the line

Item.Save

to the code below.

For some reason, Microsoft has never supported mail merging of documents to email with an attachment.  Until now, I always managed to work around this limitation.  However, when we recently completed our Renaissance Case Studies document, I wanted to send out the PDF to our email distribution list.

Alas, a quick search for mail-merging with attachments returns a bunch of commercial tools, but there was only one good example of VBA code to do this in word – found here.  Unfortunately, for some reason I was not able to get that code to work and didn’t have/want to spend the time to debug it (it could very well have been some silly/simple issue on my part).  Instead I used it as a starting point for my own VBA function, which I will share below.

Before I get to the code, let me outline the steps to create the final emails:

(1) Create a normal email mail-merge document – without any attachment – and generate the emails to be sent.

(2) Execute the VBA function / Macro Set Attachment and enter the full path to the desired attachment when prompted by the dialog.

(3) You will normally be prompted with a security warning dialog for each outgoing message that you try to access.  If you are sending more than just a few emails at a time here, I suggest you that you download and run the free utility Express ClickYes to automatically click yes for you every time.

Here is the VBA code I used for the SetAttachment function/Macro.  It is provided “As is” – it worked well for me, but you’ll have to confirm and/or modify it for your scenarios.

Sub SetAttachment()
Dim i As Long
Dim OutlookApp As Outlook.Application
Dim Item As Outlook.MailItem
Dim Filepath As String, message As String, title As String

' This sub assumes that this macro is being run from within Outlook
On Error Resume Next
‘Set OutlookApp = GetObject(, "Outlook.Application")

message = "Enter the full path to the attachment."    ' Set prompt.
title = " Email Attachment Path"    ' Set title.

' Display message, title
Filepath = InputBox(message, title)

' iterate through all items in the Outlook Outbox
Dim olNS As Outlook.NameSpace
Dim MyFolder As Outlook.MAPIFolder
Dim count As Integer

' By following change eliminates the security access prompts!
'Set olNS = oOutlookApp.GetNamespace("MAPI")
Set olNS = ThisOutlookSession.GetNamespace("MAPI")

Set MyFolder = olNS.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderOutbox)
    For i = 1 To MyFolder.Items.count
        Set Item = MyFolder.Items(i)
        Item.Attachments.Add Trim(Filepath), olByValue, 1
        Item.Save 
        Item.Send
        count = count + 1
    Next i
    Set Item = Nothing

MsgBox count & " files have been attached."

'Clean up
Set OutlookApp = Nothing

End Sub

I recently listened to a podcast with Guy Kawasaki, where he talked about successful companies and innovation.  His position is that successful innovation is not necessarily revolutionary breakthroughs – but rather, the execution of new/improved ideas.

In thinking about this, I realized that Guy’s concept applies to Microsoft as well as to my company, Renaissance Computer Systems.

In the case of Microsoft, we always hear claims that Microsoft “stole” this technology or that idea and is not really an innovator. A different way of looking at it, however, is that Microsoft’s contribution and innovation is in the execution of those ideas/technologies.  You can’t really deny Microsoft’s ability to take an idea, improve upon it (to a greater or lesser degree), and expertly execute a plan to get that technology into the hands of developers and make it as easy as possible for them to develop great applications with those technologies.

Similarly for my company, providing custom software development services per se is hardly innovative these days.  However, the execution of our plan to provide those services – how we provide them to our clients, what is our specific value proposition, and what are the tangible results for our clients – THAT is our innovation.

If you are tired of being abused by your friends and neighbors for not Twittering enough (or at all), you can send you tormentors the link to the video below.

This video humorously presents a different view of the Twitter phenomenon.  Enjoy!

via Lior

The Microsoft Patterns and Practices group just Released a set of Quick Starts and How-To documents for using Prism in Visual Basic - Visual Basic QuickStarts and How-to Topics for PrismV2 (Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight)

This release is provided to help Visual Basic developers use the Composite Application Library. The release includes QuickStarts, the Composite Application Library (only provided in C#), and documentation. The documentation includes:

• Visual Basic Content for Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight - February 2009.chm: The QuickStarts, Hands-On Labs, and How-to Topics in Visual Basic.

• Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight - February 2009.chm: Complete documentation in C#.

• Composite Application Library Reference February 2009.chm: Library reference API.

The Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight is designed to help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight client applications. It will help you design and build enterprise-level composite WPF client applications—composite applications use loosely coupled, independently evolvable pieces that work together in the overall application.

As someone who has been been on the developer conference speaking circuit for over 10 years, the standard session time of an hour and a quarter (75 minutes), including time for Q&A, is pretty much ingrained in me.  Even VSLive conferences, who for many years held on to their 60-minute session format, switched over to the 75-minute format a few years ago.

So imagine the “change” when I had only 2-3 minutes to pitch my company at the Internet and Mobile Boot Camp this week. 

This short talk was different from most things that I have ever done – not only because it was so short in duration. It wasn’t a technical presentation, I had no PowerPoint slides, and the audience was mainly VCs and investors, not developers.

Oh, and because of the different format and audience, I rehearsed almost 2 full hours for this 2-minute presentation, until I got the wording and presentation just right.