On December 8, 2001: We had a well-received theme meeting, with both Visual Basic SIGs and the Access SIG addressing the topic of Reading and Writing Files in Visual Basic and Visual Basic for Applications. SIG Leader Larry Linson discussed and demonstrated Random Access File Input and Output. Random Access allows us to structure different types of related data into records (much as we structure Tables in Access) and retrieve or update individual records directly.

In combination with Binary File I/O to implement indexes, this allows us to build specialized, application-specific, Roll Your Own (RYO) databases in Visual Basic, Access, and other applications. We'll save RYO Databases for a separate later presentation.

In November, 2001: Special Thanks to SIG Leader Dan Ogden, of the Application Developer Issues SIG. Dan responded to an urgent eleventh-hour request from ailing SIG Leader Larry Linson, stepped in and provided the presentation.  He reviewed several items from Microsoft Press and responded to a number of questions.

In October, 2001: We had special guest speakers from Compuware Corporation-NuMega: Toby Atherton, Distributed Systems Account Manager, Matt Jones, Systems Engineer, and Zac Childress, their teammate. They presented the DevPartner Studio in the Developer Issues SIG and DBPartner Debugger for Microsoft SQL Server in the Access SIG.

And, in the true tradition of drawing for valuable prizes, Compuware Corporation-NuMega held a drawing for a copy of each of these products, and several consolation prize packages. There's no need to say that “value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder” here, these are very impressive prizes!