January 2006 - Posts

The Long Dark Night of the Source
In keeping with my New Year's dedication to work I have taken on an Access VBA project.  It has the usual plethora of macros, modules, forms, tables, and views.  It also has a legacy of several different developers with diverse styles and faults, and it sports about 1 runtime error for every 20 lines of code.

It's been quite a while since I've locked myself in my house for days on end, only accepting short and impersonal visits from food delivery people, ignoring pub invites and shunning sunlight, but it seems I may have bought myself a stint of some Serious Coding.
No more nasty Word HTML
Jeff Atwood has a neat little piece of clean-up code for HTML generated by Word on his blog, Coding Horror.
New Year

This year is going to be a real working year for me, as well as very studious.  I begin my first year of law studies, and at the same time I've vowed to waste no time on television or pubs, except maybe one or two weekends a month.  The rest of the time I'm investing in getting to know Visual Studio and the .NET Framework intimately by turning out as many little projects dealing with different technologies and patterns as possible. 

Hopefully most of these projects can become articles as well, because in each I will try and tackle something that the normal documentation skirts quite well, like my little wrestling match over the weekend trying to get a DictionaryBase collection bound to a DataGrid.  I’ve heard rumours it’s possible but I took the yellow way and settled for a CollectionBase collection.  Now just to implement IBindingList and IEditableObject before I’m on speaking terms with the DataGrid and its bindings again.