Articles
-
DSO Framer vs. Edraw Office Viewer
Just a quick one: Anyone out there that needs to embed Microsoft Office into their application somehow can do so using a sample OCX available from Microsoft called DSO Framer (KB311765) as a starting point. The sample does everything you need it to out of the box, but the biggest trick is to make sure you're closing each office instantiation cleanly.
It also allows you to play with disabling menus, toggling read-only, and redirecting other functions, and can be quite powerful. At the time of writing, it still works for the up-coming Office 2010, but I would recommend you avoid embedding office in future unless you're unable to argue the point with your managers. While it works with Office 2007, it's a bit flakey, so I suspect Microsoft will ditch it at some point, but you can always download it here (468KiB ZIP).
Importantly, it's free. Do not spend your money on Edraw Office Viewer as it's the same thing, only with renamed symbols and a hefty price tag! Go for the public domain version.
Posted
-
Fixing other people's code
I'm sick of fixing other people's code. I love the open-source community for all of the free and high-quality software that's out there. I've even contributed my own little bits and pieces, mostly in the form of patches, here and there.
What I hate about the open-source movement are the egos. The problem is that the people who started a project end up actually belittling the project because of their own arrogance. Suggest something, or even provide a patch, and these particular people will tell you that your idea is wrong, that you don't know what you're doing, and so forth. On the other hand, they may never respond. I can understand this to a certain extent; I work in IT, and we're all control-freaks at some level.
Over the next year or so, I'm going to start rewriting my blog from the ground up, because this is ultimately the only way I can get the performance and feature-set I want without hacking at someone else's system. This also means my little DVD collection database will be frozen and remain incomplete until I rewrite that part too.
Posted
-
Serf
People don't seem to realise that computer programming is an artistic discipline rather than procedural office work. Those outside of the field would probably scoff at that remark, after they've put together a pivot table within excel. Just because you can cook doesn't make you a chef.
Your average manager fails to understand the difference between someone within an artistic job and someone with a procedural job — the difference being that to accomplish their goal one designs and constructs while the other follows list of tasks. Just because you're a mechanic doesn't make you an automotive engineer.
Posted
