One of the big tools missing from my coding arsenal has been a place to store code that I’ve written.  Jon Peltier claims that one of his most important tools for developing is Google, and I can’t argue with that.  One funny thing that has happened to me, though, is having Googled for how to do something, and the first hit was a KB entry at vbaexpress.com that I wrote!  I didn’t even remember writing it actually…

At any rate, the reason I use Google many times is that it’s quicker than trying to remember which file I used when I wrote something cool, and dig the file out.  I’ve long felt that it would be nice to have some place to store all of my code, but:

• I’m not a fan of using the Personal.xls workbook to that end.  I wanted something that I could share across a network.
• I didn’t want to create an add-in, as I don’t really need a huge workbook full of code loading every time if I don’t need it.  Talk about wasting resources.

In discussions with some friends, (Bob Phillips being one,) the concept of code libraries were discussed, but nothing was readily available.  Until now…

Over the past few months, my friend Dennis Wallentin (aka XL-Dennis) has been building a new add-in called the Net Co Library, and early this week it was release to the public.

Net Co Library is a database system that snaps into the VBE, allowing you to store those key procedures for when you need them again.  You can store code snippets, procedures, modules and even SQL queries within the database.  Within those categories, you can create subcategories to organize your collected code samples.  You can even make notes that are stored with the procedures, and you can search any of these fields for keywords.  Here’s a picture of the main Code Library UI:

As Dennis explains on his blog, the name of the add-in is NET, for the .NET language it is programmed in, Co for either Code or Connection, both of which is stores, and hopefully you can figure out the library part on your own. 

On of the things that I really like about this is, because it stores its data in a database, I can access it from multiple locations at the same time.  To put it another way, consider the environment I run my systems in:

I run a Vista OS on my laptop and installed the Net Co Library.  I also have VMWare, and run my work PC (a Windows XP guest) as well as all my testing environments in VMWare images.  Within those images, I can map a network drive back to a shared folder on the host, which happens to hold the Net Co Library database.  With this setup, I can then use the same database between all instances.  In fact, I can even access the database on the guest while it’s open on the host or vice versa.  It’s just an mdb database, after all, which supports multiple users.

Overall, I’m really thrilled with this Add-in, and it’s already become one of the “essential” add-ins that I will install on every system, along with MZ Tools and SmartIndenter.  If you do any amount of coding, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

I’m sure that Dennis, being a power user of VMWare, can list a hundred things, but I’m going to talk about a couple. One that is, IMHO, the number one reason developers should use it, and another that I experimented with briefly tonight.

Snapshots

This is a very cool feature, and the concept works like this…

• Install an operating system in a VMWare disk
• Snapshot it
• Install an application on the virtual OS
• Snapshot it

Now, the reason this is cool is twofold.

First, you don’t have to consume the space on your hard drive for another full installation of the base OS. (And feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on this.) So if I decided to install Excel 2003 on my snapshot, for example, I’m increasing my storage needs by the size of the Excel install, and not the another full copy of the base OS as well.

Second, you can revert to a prior snapshot and branch off at any point. It also gives a really nice little tool that gives you a visual of what you have. Here’s my current testing platform snapshot tree:

As you can see, I have a Windows XP install, and a few different options to choose from. In the current view, I was testing some PDFCreator stuff on Office 2003. I could just as easily flip back to the base XP image and install Office XP or 97 if I needed to test something on that platform. I don’t need to reinstall a full clean OS… I already have one to start from. So I can get my install up an running very quickly.

This is an incredibly robust feature in VMWare, and SO easy to use. The only hints that I would give you if you’ve never done this before are these:

• Shut down your virtual machine before you take the snapshot. You CAN snapshot a running VM, but it then creates huge files as it has to save the running state of the machine. They are way more trimmed if the machine is off.
• To get the best performance now and in snapshots based off earlier snapshots, always defragment the image inside the VM and shrink the disk before snapshotting. This keeps the image as small and efficient as possible.

While it is possible to do a similar thing using Microsoft’s Virtual PC, (hereafter called VPC,) it’s not nearly as easy to set up, nor to comfortably manage. VMWare has this set up so that it is intuitive, and easy to read. With VPC, in my experience, it’s really easy to lose track of what disks are what, as there is no UI that tells you.  If you are using Virtual PC though, I linked to an excellent article on this subject in my first post about virtualization about a year ago.

Pre-built images

One of virtualization’s big strengths is that it moves operating systems into a hardware agnostic environment. Basically, this means that VMWare/VPC translates between your host OS’s drivers and the generic drivers needed in the VM. This allows for disaster recovery, as you only need to back up your VM, and you can reload it on any machine that has your virtualization (VMWare or VPC) software on it. It also allows for the next thing I want to talk about… pre-built images.

Last week, I saw a page (can’t remember where) that pointed to a product called Deki Wiki. The only remarkable thing to me at the time was that it was provided in a VMWare image for you to download and use immediately. I kind of remarked at the time that it was a pretty neat concept. Well… yesterday at work it occured to me that a wiki might be an interesting tool to build procedure manuals at work. If everyone in the company could be set up with rights to create, search and update procedures for tasks, maybe we’d stand a chance of keeping our docs up to date. I figured I’d download it and give it a try.

The download was pretty big, but once in an unzipped, all I had to do was double click the vmdk file. It launched a linux server, I opened up my web browser, put in the IP, and away I’m playing with their wiki software. Pretty cool really. I didn’t need to learn a thing about linux, didn’t have to install a new program on my website, or anything.

It’s not like this is the only one either, but it is the first open source project I came across. For MSDN and TechNet subscribers, we can download pre-built Virtual PC images of servers and such as well. And, of course, VMWare has a way to port Virtual PC images to VMWare workstations.

I’m curious if any other VMWare users out there have picked up any open source projects like this?

I've been moving around in Visual Studio for the last hour, trying to get familiar with it.  As always, I feel that the best way to learn to use a program is to start with a project, so I decided to re-write my templates add-in for Excel 2007.  In truth, I would prefer to re-write my Favourites add-in, but it will be more difficult, so I'm using the templates one as a learning ground.

So here are my first impressions of Visual Studio 2005 from the point of view of someone who is pretty comfortable in the Excel VBE:

• Overwhelming
• Powerful
• Exciting

That is exactly the order that my feelings went, with about 20 minutes between each...

There are so many commands in here, that it's hard to figure out what I'm trying to do.  It took me 10 minutes to figure out how to change the name of my project (right click on it and say "rename"... don't I feel like an idiot now!)   I may have complicated things though, as I installed MZ Tools immediately, just because I didn't have enough tools to get lost in right away. 

To further complicate things, (as if the new UI wasn't enough to deal with,) the code is all VB.Net.  This means that I'm going to have to convert some of my code (how much remains to be seen) to VB.Net from VBA.  The first example I came across was a Property statement.  In VBA, we'd have a Property Let and Property Get routine.  In VB.Net though, it's all in one routine:

Now I haven't even got to the point where I can attempt to debug this yet, so it could be totally wrong, but it does look like the help file example.    If it is right, I actually like this better.  It  sure makes it easier to keep straight, and keeps the code collected better.

Now, back to the Visual Studio IDE... here's some of the things that strike me as really cool:

• You can collapse blocks of code.  In the example above, I can collapse the Get portion, the Set portion, the comment portion, or the whole routine.  Very cool!
• Adding code to deal with the Ribbon is as easy as choosing Project|Add Module|Ribbon support.  (Actually, this is a VSTO template, not strictly VS alone.)  As soon as you do, *poof!*, you have a module set up with the code to create a sample ribbonUI.  In fact, the RibbonX code is in another module, so you can edit it there.  All the info in one place, rather than flipping back and forth between Excel and the CustomUI editor.
• An error list at the bottom of the screen highlights all the errors in your code.  (I have a ton right now!)  This is how I knew that my Property routines were at issue.
• The help files seem to have a lot of information and it's actually helpful.  That may sound a little cheeky, but I always found the help files in Excel 2002 and prior quite frustrating.  2003 was okay, but 2007 seems better from what I've seen.  I may change my opinion on this, but the Property help page was quite easy to use.

At any rate, that's about as far as I've got with it so far, but I like what I see.  I do understand why Microsoft is pushing developers to use this product, but I still feel that they should give the tools to those developing within Excel from start to finish.  The reason I'm in this program at all is because the only hope I have of populating a RibbonX group on the fly is by writing a COM add-in, and that shouldn't be the case.

Just my 2 cents on the matter. 

Well, I tried running Vista since mid November, so I figured I've given it a valiant shot.  On Thursday I blew it away, returning to the comfort and performance of Windows XP.

There were two real issues for me with Vista, and why I decided to can it.  Both of them revolve around hardware issues in a way, which I figured that I could work through.  I use a Toshiba Satellite P30 laptop, which boasts a 17" widescreen monitor (1440x900), a hyperthreaded 3.06 GHz processor, and was upgraded to 1 GB of Ram.  Based on all the specs for Vista, that should be plenty, despite the fact that the new OS now requires a whopping 512MB of RAM for it's own use.  (As an aside, I remember sitting on the bus in high school when one of the cool kids had just got a desktop with 512KB of RAM.  It was going to be a killer gaming machine! LOL!)

At any rate, armed with my healthy PC and the disk, I installed Vista, and took it for a 1 1/2 month test drive.

Now, I didn't hate Vista by any means.  It's a very attractive user interface.  Some of the gadgets that you can put on your desktop are quite neat, although you do have to minimize all your programs to see them.  (Something that doesn't usually happen in my experience.)  I'll admit that I found the updated explorer a little clunky, but that may have just been me.

So what were the issues that caused me to drop Vista?

Lack of driver support.

Okay, now I'd be an idiot if I thought that everything would be supported, and I'd like to think I'm not.  There were about 5 drivers in all that I couldn't get, and I only cared about one of them:  Video.  My Toshiba sports a Mobility Radeon 9600/9700 card, and the native drivers just didn't work.  Sure, they displayed an image, but the max resolution I could get was 1024x768.  Not only did it look a little funny on the widescreen, but I really felt the decrease in screen real-estate.  I waited about 3 weeks, hoping that it would be fixed, an then went on a hunt for experimental drivers.

Toshiba naturally didn't post any new drivers for my machine with Vista.  Why would they?  After all, this laptop is an obselete product, being purchased almost 2 years ago.  But this is where I found something that really surprised me... ATI is an AMD product.  Why am I surprised?  My processor is an Intel... I really didn't think that these guys would mix things up, but then what do I know? 

At any rate, I found the ATI site, and they even had a Beta suite for Vista.  Sweet! I thought, downloaded it and installed.  The driver wouldn't even start.  So here I am no better off.  I submitted a detailed email to their team, and never received even so much as an acknowledgment.

Now, if there is one thing that really irks me, it's not bothering to reply to someone who sends Beta feedback.  I am going to the effort of testing your product.  The reasons I'll do this are varied, from interest to need, but the least that you can do when I volunteer my time and effort to testing your product, is send me an automated reply that says thank you.

Two days after I submitted my email, they uploaded a new build at ATI, which I downloaded.  Again, no luck with installation.  Again the driver did not even start, with errors generated in the Vista Problem Reports Section.  In three weeks, the build never changed again, and the claustrophobia finally got to me.

Performance

The other issue that really drove me up the wall was speed.  I still feel that my computer's specs are quite current, despite the fact that I don't have a dual core with more than a GB of RAM.

Vista boots quite quickly.  Faster, I think, than XP.  But trying to run programs is frustrating.  When I open Outlook 2007 on XP, it takes a few seconds.  When I did it in Vista, it would take over a minute, and show the "program is not responding" message.  Trying to open 2-3 programs at once... not good enough.

And then comes the UAC, or "User Access Control" feature.  Naturally, this is another one of those things that is supposed to protect you from yourself.  If you try to open a program that has not been digitally signed, you get prompted to ask if you're sure.  Fine, no problem.  But I have a few programs that are not signed, and that I use frequently.  By design, the team at Microsoft decided that you would not be able to check a box to say "don't ask me about this program again".  My personal feeling is that this was an absolutely ridiculous decision.  I believe that you can turn off the UAC feature, but why should I have to sacrifice the protection everywhere to allow certain trusted programs to run.  I hope that Microsoft one day realizes that the solution to security is not to add more clicks to slow users down, but rests in other methods.  (And no, I'm not saying I know what they are, that's up to them to figure out.)  Just think how effect it is with your printer's "are you sure prompt"... you click print, then you click "Yes".  Then you realize that you made a mistake!  Additional prompts are effective the first few times, then lose their effect.  Users become conditioned to them.

So there you have it... the reasons I canned Vista.  And I gave myself quite a scare on trying to replace it with XP too...  The disk I burned for the XP OS (legal, thank you), wouldn't boot!  It just skipped right by and went in to Vista.  I seriously thought that I was going to need a new laptop as Vista appeared to be holding on tightly.  LOL!  Fortunately I realized it, got a new disk, and was able to install XP Pro again.  And boy, at that point did I ever miss Vista's quick install.  6 hours later my machine was back on XP, patched, and programs installed.  In fairness, there aren't many patches for Vista yet, and less programs work there.  I'm also quite familiar with my XP install process, and like my machine customized to a certain way, all of which takes time.  I still feel that the Vista install is faster though.

At any rate, I'm back on XP now, and will try Vista again when my wife and I replace her PC in March and it comes pre-installed.  

If you are working with RibbonX code in Microsoft Office, you no doubt use the CustomUI editor from OpenXML Developer.

The tool has is an essential one for working with RibbonX and Office as it offers us the following advantages:

• Much easier than manual adjustments to the Office file
• A button to validate the XML for correctness
• An easy way to import and rename pictures
• A tool to generate callbacks with the correct syntax
• Ability to generate sample XML code to start from

I will honestly say that I will not try to attempt to modify RibbonX code without it.

There is one thing that you need to be aware of, however, and that is the danger of overwriting your file by accident.

To modify your XML markup, you open your file in the CustomUI tool, edit it, and save it.  If you're anything like me, though, you then open it up in your application without closing the CustomUI file.  Why?  Because you have to ensure your controls are correctly referenced in VBA code and the spelling is important.

The danger of this is making updates to your XML.  If you've already added a ton of VBA code, saved the file (Excel workbook, Word doc, etc...) and exited it, well... no big deal.  The issue comes in if you edit the XML in the document that still sits open in your CustomUI editor, then save it.  *Poof!*  There goes the code you programmed.

It's like a copy of the file is opened in the CustomUI tool.  You can't overwrite the file until it's closed, but when you do, it's overwritten with the copy that is open in the CustomUI tool, not updated.

So, rule of thumb, if you are keeping the XML open to review, is to close the source file, then close and re-open the file showing in the CustomUI editor.

Hopefully it saves someone from re-writing a bunch of code. 

Over the past year and a bit, I've begun playing with Virtualization on my PC. The reason was mainly because I got very tired of having to rebuild my OS when I inevitably got it so cluttered with garbage that it drove me crazy. I'm not talking viruses or other malware, just programs reminants from a variety of shareware and other software installs and uninstalls.

I started with a very brief trial of VMWare Workstation, but gave up on it quickly at the time as I thought it was overkill for what I needed. In fairness, I was actually struggling with the concept of virtualization, and why I'd even need it. After about couple more OS rebuilds, though, I gave it a shot again. VMWare was again the product of choice, and I became a big fan of the snapshot feature.

VMWare

For those of you who have never used VMWare Workstation, (or any other Virtual Machine software,) you basically install another operating system in a sandbox. So for me, I was running Windows XP on my laptop, and I created a separate copy of Windows XP in a VMWare session. It's completely separate from your original install, so you can do whatever you want to it, without worry of messing up your host OS.

Now the snapshot feature allowed you to install the base virtual OS, and then manage an entire tree of snapshots. So I was able to create a nice clean Windows XP install and take a shot there. From there I was able to create several spinoff images. Let's say it looked like this:

Base

|---> Base + Office 97
|---> Base + Office 2000
|---> Base + Office 2003
|---> Base + Office 2007, Beta 2
|---> Base + Office 2007, Beta 2 + Tech Refresh

At this point, if I wanted to install a totally non office related application, I'd go back to the base snapshot, install the app I wanted, and I'd have a new snapshot with Base + MyApp. All in all a very cool feature.

This was all very good, but one big issue arose when I migrated to Vista... VMWare Workstation does not seem to play very nicely there yet.

Microsoft Virtual PC

With the upgrade to Vista, it became even more important to me to have a virtual system on my development PC. I'm now running Office 2007, but I will still need to develop and test applications to work in prior versions of Office, and on the Windows XP platform. (I'm not supporting apps on anything earlier.) So far, the only product that I've found that makes the Vista cut is Microsoft's own Virtual PC 2007 Beta.
I can't say much about the product, as I've only been using it a couple of days, but it does not have the snapshot feature that I love so much in VMWare. It does have Microsoft's own flavour of it though, called "Differencing Disks", which sounds similar. The help files are kind of weak on it, but someone pointed out an Excellent article on this feature which explains it much better than I could.

For reference, Virtual PC 2004 is free to use, as the 2007 version will be too.

Alitiris SVS Juice

One other (Free) product worth mentioning here is SVS Juice. This is not a full OS virtualization package, but rather just an application that installs as a sort of layer between your OS and the applications. Any time you want to install a new app, you can create a new layer and install the app into it. You can then activate or deactivate the application at will.

As a case study, let's assume that you get a new game from your brother. You want to try it out, but it needs an install and you're pretty sure you won't want to play it very often. This is the perfect situation for SVS Juice. You create a new layer, install the game, and can play it to try it out. Once you're done, you deactivate the layer, and all the registry keys and disk changes that it made are rolled up into a little package and stored away. They are no longer interfering with your system, and should you choose to delete the layer, will not be left behind.

I used SVS Juice to install any kind of trial software, just to avoid the left over garbage if I didn't want to keep it.

Granted, it doesn't work with everything, and it can be confusing when a file you made that day disappears, or if you want to update layers, but you can get used to it. The sad thing is that it also does not work on Vista yet.

If you are on XP though, I'd highly recommend checking it out.

I'm a big fan of Firefox, and have just recently upgraded to version 2.0. The main reasons I like it are:

• For me, I find it loads pages much faster than using Internet Explorer 7.0.
• I like the tabbed browsing. (Something that was added in IE7.)
• There are a ton of snap-in themes available
• There are a ton of extension (add-on) products available
• All themes and extensions are free.

Now, granted, IE7 introduced a lot of new features to catch up to Firefox, but I was converted a while ago. Between the add-ons, snap-ins and page speeds, though, I'm still sold on Firefox.

I run Firefox using the LittleFox theme, which makes the task bar as small as I can get it. The more screen real estate I have, the happier I am.

My add-ons include the following:

• Gmail Notifier. This little program just places a little icon in the bottom right of the Firefox window that pops up when I'm browsing and a new email comes in. I have all my forum notifications sent to a gmail account, so this is kind of handy for power surfing/posting.
• IETab. This beauty makes use of the IE ActiveX control to run IE in Firefox. You can get a fully customizable list of domains that you always want to run in an IE session. Windows update, for example, or any other Microsoft site. I love this add-on, and very rarely use IE for anything now.

What's really cool about these add-on and theme products is that they are very quick and easy to install, (just click the button, wait a couple of seconds, restart Firefox,) and you are notified if updates become available. In addition, I had no problem using them in Firefox 1.0 through 2.0.

Another great Firefox related program that I came across in the Vista install process was MozBackup. Another fast install, and I was able to back up all my Firefox data in only a few intuitive clicks. The restore was just as easy. Install MozBackup and you are only a few clicks away from restoring everything. It installed just as easily on Vista as Windows XP, and I was blown away to find that it was like I hadn't even moved from another OS. I saw a seamless transport of the following settings from version 1.5 to 2.0:

• Bookmarks
• Bookmarks Toolbar
• History
• Autocomplete settings
• IETab settings
• General options settings

Now, there is one thing I can't say I'm thrilled with in version 2.0 of Firefox. In 1.5, there was a button to the right of the screen which would close the active tab (window). So you could click it multiple times to close multiple windows. In version 2.0, the close button is found right on the tab, which means you have to mouse over to it. Much less convenient.

Overall, though, it's a small issue. I love this program, and it's one of the first things I install on any new system I use.

Last night (Friday, Nov 17), I upgraded my PC to Windows Vista. I'm fortunate to have access to the full version through MSDN, so figured that I'd give it a shot.

One thing I would recommend doing is downloading and installing the Windows Upgrade Advisor if you're going to do this. It has a pretty cool feature that scans your PC and lets you know what you may have issue with after upgrade, and what to do about it. You can print it out and have it on hand, meaning that you don't have to remember it all.

So before I did this, I did the natural thing... backups. I have my hard drive partitioned into three logical drives. One for the OS, one for general data, and one for virtual PC images. First I backed up my Outlook email, contacts and rules, Firefox settings, to my data drive, and I then burned a DVD of all my data. I always do a full install when upgrading my OS, so there was no way I was going to trust that my logical partitions wouldn't be wiped out.

Now, the install was actually kind of interesting. I read somewhere that the install was supposed to go pretty fast. I will say that it wasn't blazing, but it was definitely faster than XP. I've done more XP installs than I can remember, and it always seems to take me over an hour to go through the bare install. After that comes the inevitable customizing, which usually costs me about a day. Vista was way faster than that for sure. Within an hour, I was up and running, the only unnerving part of the install being that the screen tends to go black several times for more than 5 seconds at a time. It's not in my nature to be patient, so it was hard to ride some of those out.

One of the things that surprised me about the installation was that I didn't see a way to reformat the existing partition on the drive to start truly fresh. It identified that there was another windows version there, and moved all that info into a "windows.old" folder and left it on the drive. In addition, I had a couple of other directories there that it kept, all of which I was expecting (and would have preferred) to be gone. A few deletes there, though, and all was good.

As with all OS upgrades, it will take a little getting used to. I like the "gadgets" part, which lets me put a CPU clock, weather report, clock and pictures right on my desktop. Its a little weird to work around it at first, and may end up being a fad, but it's some kind of cool "bling" for now.

One thing we can't forget is that this may be the "Release To Manufacturer" version, but it is exactly that. Many drivers still have not yet been written. I can't install my Photosmart P1000 printer, for example. My video card is also not supported, so I can't get the 1440*900 display I'm used to on my widescreen laptop, and I'm stuck at 1280*1024. It also isn't working quite right for the gaming aspects because of that. One cool thing though, is that Vista does keep track of the drivers that have issue, and you can easily see it. The issues for my system are shown below (you may need to view it in a new window to read it):

Now I just have to hope that Microsoft and the hardware vendors do something about the issues quickly.

As far as software goes, I've actually had some pretty good luck installing things. I was a little worried that I wasn't going to be able to install some of my favourite programs, but haven't had too much problems. I managed to install Firefox 2.0, as well as Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Instant Messenger, SnagIt 8.0 and the Gmail desktop notifier. Oh, and of course Office 2007, but that one should hardly be a surprise now, should it?

The one program that did gag on me was Symantec's Corporate Antivirus. What really irritates me about that is that one their site, they say that you can get a Vista Trial. Apparently just log in to their download centre, and you should download version 10.2.x. So no problem, I head on in there, and can download 10.0.2. That is the ONLY option. I'm thinking... okay, so maybe someone made a mistake. I download the package and then check my folder only to find that I already had a copy of 10.1.x there! So the only package on Symantec's site that I can get to now is OLDER than the copy I downloaded months ago. What is up with that? And do you think that you can find an email address to contact there? Lord no. I spent longer trying to find contact information on their site than it took me to install Vista! Talk about an irritation.

At any rate, I'm still trying to get used to it right now, but it seems like a pretty smooth upgrade path to begin with.