Last Thursday (Thursday November 24th) was the Melbourne Ready Launch Tour at the Sofitel Hotel in Melbourne. Registration opened at 9 AM for a 10 AM keynote, and after I arrived at around 9:30 AM I sat in the hotel's foyer to eat breakfast and check the show bag swag. Inside the showbag were (from memory) some advertising brochures/magazines, a Microsoft pen, and a notepad; also floating around during the day was a complimentary International Developer magazine and some information on certification. There were about 10 or 12 vendors with stalls and some giveaways (I collected a radio and calculator, and was the...

One of the only MS Access-related things I still read is Garry Robinson's Access Unlimited Ezine. Garry has switched to a blog format, and his RSS feed can be found at: http://www.vb123.com/news/rss1.xml Even though I primarily work with SQL Server 2000 (although I came from an Access background as I've described here and here), I find Garry's musings interesting and concise enough to keep mt abreast of all the good Access/Office stuff. And he's Australian too! 

Jeff Atwood posts about applets that ship with the Windows OS, and suggests:...isn't the fit and finish of little applets like these-- Notepad, Calculator, Character Map, Paint, Disk Cleanup, Compressed Folders, and dozens of others-- indicative of the care and design that goes into the entire operating system? If Microsoft can't be bothered to bundle a version of Notepad that has basic amenities like a toolbar, what hope does the rest of the operating system have? Hear hear. Jeff makes a fair point here. Why do I have to replace Notepad on every Windows system I have, not because I'm super-picky...

The ASP.NET 2.0 GridView control has a simple property called "AllowSorting" which makes it easy for end-users to click a column header (rendered as a link when the "AllowSorting" property is set to "True") and sort to their heart's content - a second click on a sorted column even sorts in descending order. However, I reckon the built-in functionality is missing an image or glyph or something to show that the column has been sorted. I notice there's a few articles on adding a sort direction image to a header cell in an ASP.NET 2.0 GridView, but I wanted to write about a...