Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with software and microsoft

Building Oracle support into a Microsoft-only product

relucent — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:37:55 -0800

Currently Microsoft-only, but wanting to change our software soon to support Oracle as well. What are we getting ourselves into? My company develops a web-based human resources management system and software suite written in .NET which uses a MS SQL backend. We have been a "Microsoft shop" for at least ten years, with all of our products being written in a Microsoft language using Microsoft tools on a Microsoft database.

We recently got a fairly sizable RFP from a company who is extremely interested in our software. The RFP describes our software almost perfectly and they really want to go with us — however, their one stipulation is that our software needs to support Oracle as a backend.

The dollar amount of the contract has the upper level management willing to do whatever it takes to secure this contract, but I'm worried that we're biting off a lot more than we can chew. No one in the whole company has any Oracle experience except for one developer who has said that it's a bad idea. We also have a very tight development schedule for the next year. Also, this is the first RFP we've gotten in many years which requires Oracle as a backend, so I don't think this change will help us earn more business in the future.

Knowing what you do about the differences between MS SQL and Oracle, how reasonable would it be for a small software company to build Oracle support into their flagship product, given limited development resources and almost no Oracle knowledge?

Java Bunnies Breeding

Black_Umbrella — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:32:04 -0800

Which of these Java programs can i get rid of and why are they breeding like bunnies? Everyone that has my computer has the same issue where these things keep building up. It is school issued so i know a lot of people with the same computer and many of the same programs pre-installed. I have been deleting the old versions every now and again but why so many versions & which can I get rid of? I don't like 100+ MB bunnies breeding in my computer.

J2SE runtime vs Java 2 runtime vs Java 2 SDK vs Java(TM) update vs Java(TM) SE runtime

...I don't program so I don't need any if that is what they are used for. Oh and I run windows xp.

Did he really say that?

pwnguin — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:56:15 -0800

I've seen a quotation running around recently, attributed to Bill Gates: "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." Did he really say that? At first glance it seems witty: airplanes are supposed to be light! But now that I think about it, it's rather lame. Building an airplane isn't the same as designing one. Its entirely reasonable to measure the progress of putting an airplane together by weight. Perhaps slightly misleading in that the engines contribute the bulk of the weight but not as flat out wrong as the quote implies.

So my question is, is this attribution correct, and if so, can anyone provide a greater context within which it was stated?

Do I have to Rebuy MS Office When replacing a computer?

GregX3 — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 11:37:06 -0800

Do I need to rebuy MS office if I'm replacing a computer? I bought a Dell computer about two years ago and added the include MS office option. That computer died and I'm ordering a new Dell. Do I also need to include office on this one? Or when I bought the last one was I buying the office software which I can now use on this new one?

How do I learn the Visual Studio way of thinking about software development?

majick — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:45:19 -0800

Visual Studio for the confused: I've inherited a C#/ASPX Net 1.1 application from what appears to have been some fairly low-skill software developers. The language, systems environment, and cleaning up the software itself aren't problems, but what the hell am I supposed to do with all this IDE stuff? I need learning resources. My previous software development experience has been with fundamental tools: Makefiles, gcc, Ant, javac, and scripted build processes. I've used IDEs before, but entirely for the purposes of coding and analysis, not build processes and SCM. The situation I find myself in now requires I come up to speed on the Visual Studio 2003 build system, and I'm finding it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever due to my lack of grounding in graphical build tools. It's further complicated by the way the tool seems to be conceptually tied to a web server for the purpose of development.

There seems to be a tremendous amount of magic hidden in things like "solution files" and "project files" and zillions of little "properties" windows that own metadata about dependencies and the source tree, and it's all very confusing for someone coming from a more traditional and modular software tools environment. Reverse engineering this stuff is sapping a tremendous amount of my time and productivity, especially since it seems like the previous folks on the project made assumptions about the build environment that are no longer true.

So what should I be reading that will give me a background on this Microsoft-flavored build environment so that I can get to the work at hand? I want to get this code into Subversion and make it buildable by anyone who can check it out, but that is looking more and more like I'm going to have to rejigger what happens when the Build button is pushed to remove hardcoded UNC pathnames of servers that don't exist, an almost arbitrary scattering of build prerequisites, and dependencies on having a web server at hand just to produce object code and a MSI installer.

Right now I'm coming up against something that seems like an alien artifact from a world where the definition of what a codebase is and how you build it happens to completely differ from my own. It seems completely ass-backwards every time I look at it and adds a layer of complexity that I'm unaccustomed to in my tools. Overcoming that barrier is going to be key to my short term success. What should I be reading to learn best practices about Microsoft-flavored development tools and fundamentals of the Visual Studio way of thinking about a software "solution" in order to put this codebase on track to be properly maintained? Where I come from, a couple of hours with a text editor, a fresh build script, and svn ci would have given me build automation, SCM, and code drop portability. Instead I'm in a maze of twisty little properties pages, all alike, and eliminating my ignorance is an important first step.

Please note that I'm not asking about tool choice. I can make tool decisions on my own. I'm looking for ways to educate myself on how what I have works as is, so I can make intelligent decisions about how to restructure and retool the project for maintainability and save a lot of pain for the next person who has to tend to this application. I work with that next person, and want to be nice to them by giving them a software project, toolchain and development process that Just Works.

How do I get rid of, then keep MS Office?

edjusted — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:59:13 -0800

My Win XP laptop came with a trial version of Microsoft *small business* office 2007. Without really thinking about it, I imported a lot of email and Outlook data from my old laptop. Now that the trial is almost over, I bought a retail copy of Outlook 2007 and the Home/student version of Office 2007, and the product keys don't work, since I'm trying to use the product key on the Small Business edition. Can I simply uninstall the trial small biz version, install the Outlook and home/student office, and have my Outlook data intact? Or is there more to be done to accomplish this?

MS Word: Strip all styles while retaining formatting?

yesno — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 08:14:21 -0800

I have a macro that takes an un-styled document, and tries to put text into the right styles based on what its formatting is. But, if the document already has some scheme of styles, the macro doesn't work very well. So, I would like to transform a Word document into an un-styled version of itself-- but one that retains ALL of the original formatting (italics, small caps, font size, spacing). What would be the most correct way to do this? I have Word 2003 (which the macro needs) and 2007, as well as Word 2008 for Mac. Also-- HTML doesn't work, as it doesn't retain small caps.

Office 2007: Why is the interface distorted?

fourstar — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:18:06 -0800

Office 2007 (Professional Plus) filter: Why are the Ribbon and other program icons/interface disproportionately stretched? Just did a fresh reinstall of Windows XP Pro on a Thinkpad (using Lenovo recovery disks). Installed Office 2007 Professional Plus and now the ribbon and other icons are ~150% of the size they should be. The stretching is pixely and it occurs in all Office programs (Word/Excel/etc) ... in Excel the font is extra large. (In the screen capture above, I included Acrobat and Notepad for comparrison/reference.)

Any ideas to remedy this visual irritation?

Please help with this simple MS Excel problem!!

writingjulie — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 09:04:24 -0800

MS Excel Problem: CAN ANYONE PLEASE HELP? I am a very average PC user having unable to open spreadsheets. I borrowed a copy of MS Office Professional from a friend, but it did not install Excel properly. I no longer have access to those installation CDs. Whenever I try to open a spreadsheet, it prompts me for the CD's. So I bought Excel 97, installed it fine, but still when I try o open a spreadsheet it automatically tries to open it with the XP Professional version... How so I get around this to just use the Excel 97 version now on my computer??

How do I clone an IIS 5 Website to another Server?

LMG — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 05:00:18 -0800

Does anybody know if it is possible to clone an Microsoft IIS 5 website to another webserver running IIS 5? I understand how to copy the files and permissions to another server but how do I copy the information contained in the metabase such as virtual directories and directory settings?

Mobile Office for MotoQ?

GhostintheMachine — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 07:18:15 -0800

Can I buy Microsoft Office Mobile? Where? My work just bought me a MotoQ, which is great. But it doesn't include Office Mobile, which would be a real benefit (as would being able to Sync to Mac, but that question's been asked elsewhere). Trouble is, the oh-so-helpful Microsoft site doesn't seem to indicate if it can be bought separately, and Google's been no help to me.

Is it even possible to buy it when it doesn't come pre-installed on the smartphone? If not, does anyone have any recommendations for equivalent software? I really only need something that can edit .doc files, and sometimes .xls (but I can live without that). Any ideas?

Microsoft Word doc saved as email

acoutu — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 14:40:46 -0800

MSWordFilter: how do I convert back after accidentally clicking "send to" and turning my doc into an email? While working on a Microsoft Word document, I accidentally converted the doc to an email. I think I clicked "send to" and then saved. Yes, I saved. Stupid me. Now I have my beautifully formatted document (complete with headers) set up as an email. Despite Googling and using Help, I can't figure out how to get rid of the email formatting and just have a regular document. I tried "save as", but that didn't work. I tried cutting and pasting, but this doesn't keep all the formatting. Can anyone suggest a way to keep the document as is, except for the email part? Thanks.

How to display a system modal dialog on Symbian or Windows Mobile?

oferhalevi — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 10:20:09 -0800

I'm interested in displaying a system modal dialog on a Symbian S60/UIQ and/or a Windows Mobile device. The idea is to display a dialog which the user cannot switch from until a selection is made or some text is entered.
I haven't had any luck so far with the various SDK documentation, so any clues would be most appreciated.

--Ofer.

Updated software for my Microsoft Office Keyboard?

frogan — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 17:00:50 -0800

Updated software for my Microsoft Office Keyboard? I have a Microsoft Office Keyboard (year: 2000, looks like this), and it's the best keyboard I can find for what I want it to do. However, Microsoft has discontinued the product and its software support -- the most recent version of Intellitype doesn't support the Office keyboard's unique set of custom hotkeys. The old version of the hardware drivers and hotkey support can be somewhat flaky, forcing reboots to reset buttons to working status.

Anyone have any advice, such as drivers more recent than IntelliType Pro 2.2?

Bonus points if you suggest a brand-new keyboard with the Office keyboard's nifty layout, which I've never seen repeated.

Nothing but .net

lukemeister — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 06:02:19 -0800

Why don't the New York Times Reader, Doppler, and Juice work? Doppler and Juice started crashing on my XP (SP2) box after a period of normal use, and I can't get the Times Reader to run at all. The common thread seems to be that these applications use various versions of .NET. The Times Reader requires the NET 3.0 Framework, which supposedly was downloaded as part of the Reader install. Any suggestions?

Understanding external references in Microsoft Excel?

arimathea — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 07:05:20 -0800

It's very clear in Microsoft Excel how to calculate formulas using external references, but what isn't clear is how, in several worksheets, to have the same data in certain columns. How do I do this? Say I have an Excel file with multiple workbooks - BOOKONE, BOOKTWO, BOOKTHREE. Now, in each of these workbooks or worksheets, I have data that looks like, well, a price list, with a textual description, part number, price, etc. If in BOOKTWO I want to reference the data in BOOKONE - multiple cells at once - how can I do that? The range operator, e.g. ='BOOKONE'!A1:A15, doesn't work correctly, reporting #VALUE.

Microsoft's Virtual PC 2004 is now FREE - Does it work from MCE 2002?

Jhaus — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 16:38:32 -0800

Seeing that it's now free, can Microsoft's Virtual PC 2004 work with Windows Media Center Edition 2002 - sp2 as the host OS? I know that the guide says it is only compatible with XP Professional and Windows 2000, but I was wondering if anyone has had success with it this way (I recall hearing that MCE was the same as XP Pro just dressed a little differently)?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

P.S. Why would my new HP m7470n have come shipped with MCE 2002 and not MCE 2005?

Why is MS Access coloring all my text fields grey?

Tubes — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 00:35:37 -0800

Working on an MS Access 2000 record-browsing form; the text fields all display as dark grey text on light grey background, no matter what colors or transparency are specified in the design. I've never seen this before. I've been running in circles for 2 hours. What am I missing?

MS Excel Sorting

panoptican — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 08:59:15 -0800

I've got two columns in MS Excel. They each share 200 numbers. However, one of the columns has an additional 700 numbers. I want the column with 900 sorted in ascending order, with like numbers from the column of 200 beside those in the column of 900. How do I do that?

Help me hate MS Word less

.kobayashi. — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 17:44:43 -0800

Does anyone know a good resource -- better than Microsoft itself -- for easily finding how to turn off specific "features" of Microsoft Word? Specifically, I'd like to default my copy/paste options to unformatted text, but honestly, not a day goes by with that program when I don't discover something I want it to stop doing. And it usually takes me far to long to find out how to stop it. (I use the 2002 version of word, for Windows, if that matters.)
Also, just because I anticipate it coming: recommendations for alternative word processing programs really don't help answer this specific question, even if you're right about program X being better (and you probably are).

Applications that use LM or NTLM?

aacheson — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 09:14:56 -0800

LM (LanManager) & NTLM (NT Lan Manager) are old, fairly insecure MS protocols for authentication. Are there any other applications besides Win 3.1, NT (pre-sp4), 95, 98 that would require LM or NTLM for authentication? I am trying to research if any applications require these authentication protocols. I need to disable accepting these on my network, but it's basically impossible to test in our test lab because it doesn't have everything on the live network in there. So I have been trying to research but can't find anything except the MS Operating systems. (So maybe that's my answer.)

How do I cleanse myself of IE?

lazaruslong — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 14:46:22 -0800

Internet Explorer has been on thin ice for a while, and recently it crashed through. I can't even launch the damn program. I've installed Firefox and several delicious extensions, but my knowledge is limited in this whole area. How do I get rid of the old plague? Basically, I tried going to the add or remove programs thing, but there isn't a place for Internet Explorer. Knowing microsoft, i expected them to make it difficult for me to get rid of, and they succeeded. Please assume (most correctly) that I am a techno-idiot in this manner, and phrase your answers accordingly. One additional note: Right before IE died, I started getting "full cache" warnings or something like that. Whenver I tried to delete the temporary internet files folder from within IE, the program crashed. I could not find said folder manually. I'm worried that it's like a huge folder now (space is an issue with a 19gig hard drive), so instructions on how to make sure that is gone as well would be much appreciated.

MS Office on Macs

ParisParamus — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 06:05:56 -0800

Do you find that MS Office for OS X runs faster than MS Office for Mac OS 9...., run on an OS X Mac in Classic mode (or, whatever it's called...) Oh. Fast= macros in Word and Excel. I'm trying to decide if it's worth buying a new copy of Office when I buy my first OS X machine.

Where Can I Find Older Microsoft Office Updates Online?

greasy_skillet — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 09:47:55 -0800

Where are old copies of Microsoft updates (specifically for Office v.X) stored online? This is my first AskMe post, hope I did this right!!

Can you recommend a flexible Win32 application for designing test plans?

Danelope — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 15:10:43 -0800

Can you recommend a flexible Win32 application for designing test plans? I'm the testmonkey for a Windows-based software company, and I'm looking for an application that allows me to design and execute test plans. Desired features:

A Win32 application; Web-based solutions require too much overhead and are generally clumsy. If I were in the market for something Web-based, I'd probably write my own.

Open Source is preferable, though I could probably get a budget if the argument were convincing enough. Professional grade UI regardless.

Ideally, plans are broken down into a hierarchical tree structure, wherein you define n number of test sections, test cases, etc. This tree can be expanded and collapsed depending on the level of detail required.

Individual test plans are stored as discrete files rather than a central database/server.

Test case verification via PASS/FAIL, preferably with color coding.

Test plan reporting, preferably with editable templates.

Miscellaneous Non-Vital: Import/Export with Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word, time tracking per task, test regression/revision history, etc.

Any help in this pursuit is greatly appreciated. The aforementioned Excel and Word are woefully inept at these sorts of tasks.