Reason To Blog
Welcome. This is my first attempt at blogging, so bear with me. What I hope to accomplish is to post code and tips for the small business developer. Personally, I love the idea of working with small businesses to fulfil their software needs. They aren’t loaded with money, so as a developer you need to find unique ways to build software that fits their needs and budget. A good example is report writing. Typically, a business will use Excel or Access to display their data. That might be ok now, but there are limitations to what it can do. Coding is done using VBA, which is a bit old and tired. An alternative would be to write any business logic in VB.Net/C# and have it output the data into XML (e.g. SpreadSheetML for Excel) for Office 2003/2007, earlier versions will need to use Office Automation. From there the user can open the data in Excel and manipulate it as they normally do, but the code is done using the latest technology. So, there are a lot of possibilities. I hope this will be a useful outlet and all constructive criticism is welcome.