Today I was coding some C# and I decided to refresh my understanding of classes and how you declare methods and how they become accessible or inaccessible to other classes. C# has the following access modifiers, and depending on which one you use, it wll determine how other classes can use them:

• Public: Members and methods declared as public are visible to any method and to any class outside that class.
• Private: Members and Methods within a class marked as private are only accessible within that class
• Protected: Members and Methods of a class marked as protected are only accessible to methods inside that class and any classes that derive from that class
• Internal: The members in a class that are marked internal are accessible to methods of any class in that class’s assembly.

Silverlight is not a very mature implementation but the technologies it uses for that implementation aren’t new or unknown. Sure, you have to download a plugin to view Silverlight content, but other than that the technologies that are used in Silverlight are not new. Flash uses ActionScript which closely resembles JavaScript and wonder above wonder Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 uses JavaScript. Silverlight does use a technology set called XAML, but then again XAML looks and feels like XML. XML is not a new technology either. With Silverlight 2.0 you can use .NET Programming Languages such as C#. Again C# is not a new technology, and even though it has been around for less than 10 years its syntax is strikingly similar to Java and C++, which have been around for longer. Where is all of this coming from? Well in the week, Friday, to be exact I tested a Silverlight 1.x application on a local Intranet. I wanted to see what difficulties users might end up with if required to download the plugin. I sent the URL to a few developers and asked them to test it for me and one question that came back was “How long has this Silverlight technology been around?”, which got me thinking. Silverlight as an implementation is new, yes, but its underlying technology is not. There will be issues with the implementation, as with many technology sets, but the key for me as a developer is that I will be able to take my JavaScript, C#, XML and database skills and be able to build on them with this new technology. From a designer’s perspective Silverlight will not introduce any new technology sets either, because all the graphics elements used within WPF and Silverlight are Vector-based. The graphics elements are represented as XAML and interestingly enough you can export Adobe Illustrator files as XAML and import that directly into Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2008. Personally I think that shows great interoperability.

The point though is that in today’s development environment technology maturity may only point to an implementation specific issue, not a technology subset. The technology subsets that an implementation is focussed on will in all likelihood be a mature technology already.

Why would you want to use Powerpoint and Access together you may ask? I can give you a brief description of a scenario to illustrate the possible use of Access and Powerpoint, and I believe its always a good idea to narratively describe a problem (or solution) before you jump straight into it.

The church I go to every Sunday uses projectors to display hymns and scripture, and of course they use Powerpoint. For each sermon at our church we have a Powerpoint presentation that displays a certain number of hymns and certain parts of scripture. The order in which the scripture and hymns appear on the slides is pre-determined by our pastor’s liturgy. The liturgy determines in which order the hymns are sung and the scriptures are read. The hymns and scriptures might appear before and after each other. The key though is that the hymns and scripture are elements that are re-used the whole time, and are simply arranged within the liturgy, and theoretically you should not be re-creating the content for each sermon. Instead you should have a system in place that allows you to dynamically create the content as you need it. More specifically you should have a database that stores the scripture and hymn elements and have an interface that extracts the data as you need it and generates the content, which would be Powerpoint slides. So here I was thinking that there has to be some interoperability between Powerpoint and Access. On a simple user interface level this interoperability does not exist, but where it does seem to exist is in something called “Automation”. I found this MSDN article which uses VBA to achieve that exact result. It seems pretty simple at face value.