Panopea Consulting - iMIS Blog

Determining your Microsoft Office Version

Do you ever need to know what version number means what in Office? Here's the Microsoft Knowledge Base article that provides that information for Office 2003:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/821549/

Crystal Reports based on Stored Proc

If you have an 8.5 version Crystal Report that does an insert or update of data and you're running that report in a version of iMIS that uses the Crystal 9 runtime (version 10.2 or higher), you may be getting funny results. You will likely find when you run your report within iMIS that your insert or update happens but there are no records returned as a result set. Running the report outside of iMIS returns a result set as expected.

The reason this is happening is that there's an issue with the Crystal version 9 runtime that causes iMIS runs the stored proc twice each time you think you are calling it once by running the report. So the work gets done but your report is getting the result set from the second time it runs, hence no records returned. This is a problem using any stored proc that changes data. If all it is doing is selecting the data, it doesn't matter so much that it runs twice.

The solution is to upgrade your report to Crystal 9.

Need to work with ISO Images?

Here's a tool available from Microsoft if you're on a Microsoft MSDN subscription and receive software with ISO images:

Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel--The Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel lets you mount ISO images as CD-ROM devices and comes in handy for installing MSDN software downloads, which are often distributed as ISO images. You can download the control panel at http://list.windowsitpro.com/t?ctl=1DE53:2B887

HTML Editor for Communicate Templates

A client wants to be able to use Communicate to send a formatted newsletter to members, in particular they want to be able to do bullets and have them look good in the email when it's received.

The problem is that Communicate can't do that in its Rich Text Editor. When an RTF file is converted to HTML, it's a less than perfect conversion. Because Communicate is built in Microsoft Access, the RTF editor must be compatible with Access and VanDamme Associates, the developers of Communicate have not been able to find a better one than the one they are using.

To have a nicely formatted e-newsletter, the answer is to put all of the content into the HTML template file. The next challenge, though, is that for people who are not very conversant in HTML, that's a barrier that is tough to overcome. Dreamweaver is great, but it's expensive and has a learning curve.

So, today I searched around the Internet to see if I could find a free HTML editor that could be used by a non-HTML literate user to make Communicate templates. My criteria for the perfect tool were:

• The software should be free.
• Must allow WYSIWYG creation of HTML for users who don't know HTML.
• Must have the ability to edit with the type of functionality users of Word are used to (i.e., must be able to bold things or change fonts easily.

I first looked at <blink> based on the recommendation from Sig VanDamme. I like it.

But I also tried a number of others and the winner I selected is NVu (pronounced "en View"). It's open source and has Linux, Mac and Windows versions. You can get it from www.nvu.com.

The state of .NET in the world

Visual Studio 2005 was released in November 2005. Note that Microsoft dropped the ".NET" out of the name. That might make you wonder how is .NET doing in terms of adoption? This is an excerpt of an article in the Developer .NET UPDATE newsletter I receive, which, of course, will have a bias toward saying all is great in the .NET world, but I thought it was interesting. I look forward to the day that iMIS is a 100% .NET application and our world becomes Omnis7-free:

In the January 2002 article "Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework Production Releases" (http://lists.sqlmag.com/t?ctl=1D49E:7B47A), Tim Huckaby warned that we would probably see a slow adoption curve among developers. However, not everyone was prepared for slow adoption. As a result, articles about the slow adoption and even the possible death of .NET began to pop up. For example, in the September 2002 article ".NET: The Next Macintosh, or just Active Desktop 2005?" (http://lists.sqlmag.com/t?ctl=1D49A:7B47A), Paul Thurrott wrote, "I still feel like a .NET apologist." (Note that many of Paul's articles are Web exclusives that have been misattributed to the Developer .NET Perspectives column.) A month later, in the October 2002 article ".NET Comes in Through the Out Door" (http://lists.sqlmag.com/t?ctl=1D494:7B47A), Paul briefly looked at where .NET was succeeding with developers and where it supposedly wasn't. Then, in his February 2003 column, Paul's question was ".NET: What's in a Name?" (http://lists.sqlmag.com/t?ctl=1D496:7B47A). By April 2003, Paul was asking "Is .NET on the Way Out?" (http://lists.sqlmag.com/t?ctl=1D497:7B47A). Now in fairness to Paul, his articles primarily focused on .NET as a service- based offering, such as Passport--aka the newly (re?) launched Windows Live (http://lists.sqlmag.com/t?ctl=1D49D:7B47A ). Paul wasn't the only one predicting the death of .NET. The criticism and doubt were industrywide. 

Slowly things began to change. In November 2003, Michael Otey asked "Is .NET Dead?" (http://lists.sqlmag.com/t?ctl=1D495:7B47A). His conclusion at the time was that .NET was alive and well. He reinforced this point in August 2004 when he wrote, "Microsoft developers, the first adopters of VB.NET, have been using the language for almost 4 years now. Except for support issues, VB 6.0 is off their radar" ("Is VB Dead?" http://lists.sqlmag.com/t?ctl=1D498:7B47A). The fact is that .NET adoption was slow, as Tim Huckaby foresaw back in January 2002, before any of these other articles were written.   

Where is .NET today? Its adoption rate is higher than ever. In fact, it's over the crest and crashing like a wave. InterKnowlogy and other organizations that specialize in .NET development have more work than they can handle. The IDC research report "2005 Mission Critical Survey." confirms this trend. In this report, IDC makes it clear that .NET adoption is not only doing fine but also impacting every server product and every developer tool that Microsoft produces. In fact, .NET development has become synonymous with new development and has changed the face of developments and the way we use the Web. (Microsoft contracted IDC's Quantitative Research Group to conduct this survey of IT organizations to assess the state of current practices toward mission critical applications. You can download the report at http://lists.sqlmag.com/t?ctl=1D48D:7B47A.)

by Bill Sheldon, bills@interknowlogy.com

Critical Microsoft Security Patch

A critical security issue was found in Microsoft OS versions Windows 2000 and higher and a patch became available on Jan. 5, 2006. I imagine that most organizations with an IT staff are aware of the issue and have patched it, but do be sure to do the same on your home, especially those of you have kids who might not be so careful about what links they click on.

Here's Microsoft's explanation of the problem:

A remote code execution vulnerability exists in the Graphics Rendering Engine because of the way that it handles Windows Metafile (WMF) images. An attacker could exploit the vulnerability by constructing a specially crafted WMF image that could potentially allow remote code execution if a user visited a malicious Web site or opened a specially crafted attachment in e-mail. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system.

These are mitigating factors:

• In a Web-based attack scenario, an attacker could host a Web site that contains a Web page that is used to exploit this vulnerability. Also, Web sites that accept or host user-provided content or advertisements, and compromised Web sites, may contain malicious content that could exploit this vulnerability. In all cases, however, an attacker would have no way to force users to visit these Web sites. Instead, an attacker would have to persuade users to visit the Web site, typically by getting them to click a link in an e-mail or Instant Messenger request that takes users to the attacker's Web site.
• An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the local user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

For more information see this page on Microsoft's site.

Better Performance in your VM world

One of the ways you can run more versions of iMIS on a single machine is by the use of Virtual Machine software. I use VMware to do this on my computers. The performance, however, is pretty pokey. It's not too bad all in all, but I've wondered about how it could be better. Well, wonder no more. I came across the article below in the SQL Server Magazine UPDATE (email newsletter) that covered this topic. Here's the list of suggestions from Douglas McDowell (douglas@SolidQualityLearning.com):

Tip 1: Don't starve your host OS of RAM. You might think giving a VM lots of RAM will help it, but performance won't improve if the VM is robbing RAM from the host. Be sure you allocate less than half of your physical memory to your VM.

Tip 2: Exclude VMs from antivirus screening. Make sure your antivirus and antispyware programs are excluding your VM software processes (e.g., Virtual PC.exe) and files (e.g., virtual hard drives, settings files).

Tip 3: Disable paging of executive components. Disable the Windows Paging Executive on your host workstation and VM so that Windows executive components never get paged. You can disable the Paging Executive only by editing the registry, which you must do at your own risk and only after backing up your registry with the Windows backup utility (by selecting System State). You'll need to change the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Session Manager \ Memory Management \ DisablePagingExecutive key from 0 to 1.

Tip 4: Make the most of defragmentation. Defragment your host machine and defragment and compact your VMs. Defragmenting always minimizes disk I/O, and compacting your VM will result in a performance increase. A slimmer machine will consume less RAM, leaving more RAM for the host system cache.

Tip 5: Separate your VM. Whenever possible, put your VM on a separate physical hard drive. Doing so will reduce disk contention between your host and VM.