Those of you who haven’t noticed yet MSDN has changed its look and feel from the frame-based layout to a brand new layout. My first impressions are that it really rocks.
Reading the content feels much easier. I would have liked to see some more AJAX. Notably you can also switch to the old classic view.
I had a brief glimpse of the Google phone and I must say its not a pretty phone when compared to the iPhone. The other interesting thing to note is that the iPhone does not support Flash or Silverlight at this stage and that Microsoft will be looking at putting Silverlight on the Google phone. Silverlight 2 has also just been released.
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.
