For the love of Technology

DevExpress Document Server – Automate Office Without Microsoft Office Automation

DevExpress LogoDevExpress Document Server – A couple of years ago (long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away) I had to take over a project from a developer that had left the company I worked for. Unfortunately, she left in the middle of an implementation. The application was developed and installed, but there were many change requests and I had to develop these change requests into working solutions.

One of the biggest headaches was the fact that the application did some really funky Office Word manipulation. So much so that when the company upgraded to a newer version of Office, it broke many of the installed application features. More recently though we needed to give a customer the ability to export data to Excel. The only catch was that the customer wasn’t going to install Microsoft Office.

We could obviously not use Microsoft Office automation and DevExpress Document Server is a perfect solution for times like these. (more…)

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Technology Addiction – The Next Evolution Of Man Or A Global Threat

Technology Addiction bed iphone Technology Addiction – Do you ever get the feeling that you’re too dependant on technology? Do you even think that your technology use is excessive? Now I’m not talking about someone who works in IT. Generally, I have a healthy split between family life, friends and my technology addiction.

Paul Miller took a brave step forward when he spent a year living life without the comforts that technology afford people. Some might argue that such comforts come at a price. But is it worth it that a technology addiction comes at the expense of real human interaction? (more…)

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The Daily Six Pack: August 28, 2013

A COLLECTION OF LINKS FOR LOVERS OF I.T. Dirk Strauss . . . . Feature link: Hacking China Who Hacked China's Internet Yesterday (Sunday)?, Rebecca Greenfield Other Steve Wozniak: Microsoft resting on its laurels, BBC Facebook introduces shared photo albums, Carl Franzen iOS 7: Is There Any Reason to Jailbreak Anymore?,…

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The Daily Six Pack: August 27, 2013

A COLLECTION OF LINKS FOR LOVERS OF I.T. Dirk Strauss . . . . Feature link: Steve Ballmer Retiring Microsoft’s next CEO: Who’s on the short list?, Mary Jo Foley Other Released: Crypto Obfuscator For .Net (v2013 R2), LogicNP Team 5 Common C# Misconceptions, Phillip Trelford 5 Popular and free SQLite…

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Visual Studio Spell Checker – Dot Your I’s And Cross Your T’s

Visual Studio Spell CheckerVisual Studio Spell Checker – A couple of years ago, I had to create an application  for a German company. Along with using localisation to create the German/English translation, spell checking that sucker was a challenge.

There were well over a few hundred text strings and many of these were stored in code. Nevertheless, we made it through after a long and tedious development. Suffice to say that developers aren’t the best of spell checkers.

Well now there is help on the horizon. Visual Studio Spell Checker is a free add-in available on the Visual Studio Gallery and supports Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2010. (more…)

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Parasoft Service Virtualization – Create Intelligent Test Environments

Parasoft Service Virtualization logoParasoft Service Virtualization is a product you need to seriously consider if you are developing applications that you have to test. But before I continue, let me step back a bit.

What is one of the first things you do when setting up a test environment? Well I guess that largely depends on your budget. Let us assume we all work for a company that conforms to best practices with regards to software development and the SDLC.

The easiest way to emulate the client site is to use virtualization. My current favourite being VirtualBox, but VMWare is also a great choice. Setting up a copy of the client site on a VM is the best method for testing your custom applications. It now gets even better with Parasoft Service Virtualization. (more…)

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The Daily Six Pack: August 22, 2013

A COLLECTION OF LINKS FOR LOVERS OF I.T. Dirk Strauss . . . . Feature link: Windows Azure SQL Reporting Succinctly Download Windows Azure SQL Reporting Succinctly by Stacia Misner for free!, Syncfusion Other Visual Studio 2013: Format the Current Document or Selection, zainnab How to Document that a Method Can…

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