Tony,

On Sat, 25 Aug 2007 01:09:53 +1000, Tony Smith wrote:

>...
> I spend most of my days doing VBA stuff, VB programmers look down on me  :)

LOL!  One of my former colleagues once defined "A professional development tool" as "One which users can't use themselves", which I suppose has a 
ring of truth.  And confirms the way I've always felt about Access...

> It's a nice niche, doing stuff that's 'too hard' for normal people, and 'we
> don't do that' from the 'real' programmers.  Stuck between ignorance &
> snobbery.

I do detest the snobbery that exists in my profession - as well as the sort of thing you mention, you get the "Why on Earth would you use anything 
other than C++?" type of attitude, which is basically self-centered ignorance.

When I was doing mainframe programming (a quarter of a century ago - good grief, I feel old) we had a number of different tools to use, and 
although some would always go straight to COBOL (or in one person's case, Assembler) to solve any problem, the official policy was to use the 
highest-level solution that would do it.  If I remember rightly that started at DOS utilities (that's IBM System/370 DOS), then SelCopy, then Easytrieve, 
then COBOL.  At some point in time something else that was going to save the World arrived, but I'd moved on to Datapoint minicomputers by then.  
You tell that to the kids these days...

Sorry, I was getting all "uphill both ways" there :-)
 
>...
> 
> Plenty of WTFs though.  Eg today - You can do pivots in Access, but to use
> VBA on them you need to reference the OWC DLL (Web components).  Office 2003
> installs OWC11, but Access 2003 uses OWC10 (the XP version).  Why the hell
> does it use the old version?

I blame Bill Gates...  The "we know best" attitude, that takes no account of anyone else in the game, and leads to these ridiculous dependancies 
which can mean that you have to have more than one computer, because no single one can run all of the things you need due to dependancy 
conflicts.  I kid you not, I've seen this - and in a place that had a rule of "M$ software only"!

>  And you can't manipulate the pivot on the form
> unless you load the right DLL, and you can't check pivot version unless the
> right DLL is loaded...  And what fat-fingered bastard managed to put a space
> char after captions on Outlook windows so the FindWindow API doesn't work?
> Gah.

LOL!  It sounds a little like the struggles I once had to get data from a user-entry screen, validated, into Lotus Notes.  I never managed it, and neither 
did the "expert" Notes person they brought in to do it.  It *really* shouldn't be hard, but it was ridiculously so.

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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