March 2013 For Microsoft Access, SQL Server, Visual Studio .NET, and VB6 Professionals

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Greetings!

I'm back from my first Microsoft MVP Summit meeting at Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond, WA. Though we've had three Microsoft Access MVP members on our staff over the years, this was my first year as an MVP. It was nice meeting members of the MVP community including many I've known for years electronically. We were also able to meet the Microsoft managers and team members of the Access, Office, LightSwitch, and small business teams. The sessions were under NDA, but it's clear that there are lots of activities moving forward with Office 2013, the cloud, and support for users on multiple platforms. Here's my blog about the event.

Since our last newsletter, we've updated several products, and migrated our blog from our original BlogEngine.NET site to an industry standard WordPress platform. More information below on how we did it. Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed and Like our Facebook page to receive more timely and detailed information than we can provide in our newsletter.

All the best,

Luke Chung
President

Contents

• Luke Chung Speaking at Portland Access User Group Conference
• Total Visual CodeTools Update
• Union Query Paper Updated
• Total Access Statistics Update
• Sentinel Visualizer Version 5 Ships
• Our Blog has Moved to WordPress

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Luke Chung Speaking at Portland Access User Group Conference

May 4-6, 2013
Silver Falls State Park, Oregon

FMS President Luke Chung is once again of the featured speakers at this annual Microsoft Access conference hosted by the Portland Access User Group. This will be his third year speaking at this wonderful event.

Enjoy an amazing, rustic getaway to a beautiful state park with fellow Microsoft Access enthusiasts. Book early so you can stay at the limited number of cabins available at the conference center. The conference fees are amazing low and includes meals.

Luke will participate in various talks on Microsoft Access development, running a business, and creating solutions using Visual Studio LightSwitch. He'll also be staying at the site during the entire conference, so you'll have plenty of opportunity to meet him formally and informally.

For more information, visit the conference site.

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Total Visual CodeTools 2010 Update

Total Visual CodeTools is an add-in to your Office/Access/VBA and VB6 integrated development environment (IDE) that helps you write, clean-up and deliver better solutions. Available from the IDE menu or a toolbar, a variety of tools help to increase your efficiency and consistency when writing code and taking over someone else’s work.

An update of Total Visual CodeTools 2010 was released with support for Microsoft Office/Access 2010, 2007, 2003 and Visual Basic 6.0. Several enhancements were made to improve the New Procedure Builder, VBE color scheme builder, icons for the toolbars, setup program and IDE integration, etc. Here are the details on the enhancements. Registered customers should have received email notification with download instructions of the update.

Total Visual CodeTools features include:

• Code Builders to create new procedures, properties, ADO and DAO recordsets, message boxes, select case statements; convert SQL strings, copy control event procedures, use the Format and DateDiff functions, comment blocks of text, etc.
• Cleanup Existing Module Code by adding Option Explicit, standardizing formatting, adding error handling to procedures that lack it, rename variable names to your convention, etc.
• Deliver Modules with Line Numbers plus obfuscation
• Find Unused Variables to pinpoint unnecessary code
• Macro Recorder for playing back keystrokes while editing

If you're not familiar with Total Visual CodeTools, download the free trial and use it to analyze your data.

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Union Query Paper Updated

We've updated our paper on Union Queries in Microsoft Access and SQL Server.

We better explain Union Queries and creating artificial blank rows. This paper is part of our Microsoft Access Query Help Center where you can find additional papers on queries and data analysis tips and tricks.

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Total Access Statistics Update

Total Access Statistics is the most popular and powerful data analysis tool for Microsoft Access. An update was released for versions 14.0, 12.8 and 11.8 for Access 2010, 2007 and 2003 respectively.

The update includes these enhancements:

• Significant performance improvements when processing large numbers of records
• While analyzing records, a new status form appears with an option to cancel the process
• Setup program offers machine or current user installation options

For additional information on the update, visit the Total Access Statistics Update page. Existing customers should have received email notifications to download the update.

If you're not familiar with Total Access Statistics, download the free trial and use it to analyze your data.

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Sentinel Visualizer Version 5 Ships

The FMS Advanced Systems Group has released a new version of our Sentinel Visualizer program. Sentinel Visualizer is our commercial, off-the-shelf product that lets you find hidden relationships among people, places, and events. It brings the power of data visualization, link analysis, geospatial, timeline, Social Network Analysis (SNA) to your data.

Version 5.0 adds many new features:

• A new Reader version lets you freely share your analysis with others.
• Concurrent licenses allow you to share licenses across multiple machines
• High resolution printing of network diagrams
• Stereoscopic 3D visualization and navigation
• Significant filtering and performance enhancements

Here's the complete list of Version 5.0 Enhancements.

Sentinel Visualizer is written in Visual Studio .NET and SQL Server.

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Our Blog has Moved to WordPress

We’ve migrated our blog to WordPress from our previous BlogEngine.NET platform. We hope you like it.

WordPress has become the most common Blogging format, so we’re happy to simplify the process for people to participate in our blog with their existing WordPress login. We also gain considerably more options for designing the layout of our blog.

We could have started our new blog from scratch but since our existing blog existed for many years, we wanted to migrate it with all the comments from our BlogEngine.NET host to WordPress. That turned out to be a challenge that required learning the idiosyncrasies of BlogEngine and WordPress. With the help of Microsoft Access, we created a table with the terms that needed to be translated, read the XML file from BlogEngine, then created a new XML file that WordPress would import.

For details of how we did it, visit: Migrating BlogEngine.NET Posts to WordPress with Translations Using Microsoft Access

Popular Blog Topics

After two years, this blog remains quite popular: Microsoft Access Database Scalability: How many users can it support?

Unfortunately, we still get reports of people encountering this error: Microsoft Windows Common Control Library (MSCOMCTL.OCX) Security Update Requires Fixing