In March, 2001: In a special two-hour joint meeting with the Application Developer Issues SIG, John Harbaugh, National Account Executive, and Gerry Burns, Project Manager, of The Motient Corporation, formerly known as ARDIS, presented a background of Motient’s Wireless data network, the largest in the country, and the BlackBerry email service, the wireless extension of the Outlook desktop. They also discussed issues surrounding the wireless enabling of other software application. Even for those with no immediate wireless development plans, it was an interesting and informative presentation.

We had another nice assortment of goodies for our April drawings: CDs, T-shirts, software, and sample issues, courtesy of Access / VB / SQL Advisor magazine, in an earlier drawing after the VB SIGs and several very nice long-sleeve denim shirts courtesy of The Motient Corporation after their presentation.

In February, 2001: SIG Leader Larry Linson discussed 'Creating Realistic-Looking Test Data -- Lots of It', the first of two presentations on generating test data for internal and stress testing (which need not look realistic) and generating test data for demonstrations and public view using data gathered from various sources, rearranged, and recombined. In processing the data into usable tables, Larry demonstrated the File System Object of the Windows Scripting Runtime. It performs many of the same functions as classic BASIC File I/O, but it is object-based and some think it is easier to learn and use. This segment covered using the pseudo-random number generation features of VBA to create internal test data and acquiring, 'scrubbing', and reading into tables data gathered from Internet Sources. The second segment, at a later date, will cover generating actual test data from the raw data.

In January, 2001: Brian Moore, Developer Tools Specialist from Microsoft's South Central District Office (and the local Microsoft developer guru replacement for Thomas Lewis), presented an overview of the Microsoft .NET Framework and services. Brian discussed the features and function of developing solutions in the .NET world. His presentation predominately used VB.NET and C# in the examples and demonstrations and will focus primarily on the new features of ASP.NET, Web Forms and Web Services. Brian’s presentation covered both the hour allocated to Application Developer Issues SIG and the hour allocated to the Access SIG.