[AccessD] OT:Old Dog, New Tricks

LOL, yea.  I'm here to tell you though, it is incredibly more powerful.  It's going to take you 
awhile to get the hang of it, just the simple things.  Then one day you will wake up and say "I need 
to raise an event and pass a message" and you will start another journey.  You will say "I need to 
learn threading", and you will start another journey.

I have designed a status list class which allows me to instantiate the status class deep down in a 
class structure, and pass in the list control pointer from the form.  Once I do this I can update 
the status even though the thing wanting to write to the status list is running in a thread.  Very 
cool and very powerful, especially after struggling for a long time just to update a simple text box 
from a thread.  The old way I was doing it was raising an event, handling it in the next level up, 
raising an event to pass the status up the chain etc until it was finally sunk on the form.

Ick!  But it worked.  Ick!  Sometimes you do what works because you can manage to do that.  Six 
months later you look back and go "Ick!".  But we all went through that with Access as well.

Now my status class handles all of the stuff required to get the form's thread to do the update, and 
passing the status to that thread correctly.  I now have major components three class levels down 
that can own a status list and display their status with nothing more than a call to the status 
class' method.  What a hoot!  And perhaps someday I will look back on this and go Ick!  But for now 
it works.

John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com

On 1/11/2011 3:36 PM, Tony Septav wrote:
> Thanks JW
> It may be a brave new world but it is scary.
>
> jwcolby wrote:
>
>> > 1. To finally get my Web Page (I designed it over 2 years ago) up and running. It is nothing
>> fancy but how can I be a credible programmer when I can't direct a client to my Web Page.
>>
>> When you are done with yours, how about fixing up mine? ;)
>>
>> > 2. Start learning VB.Net. I know some of you favour VB.C+ but I am an old dog and I didn't want
>> to tackle any thing too foreign.
>>
>> As I said many times, pick a .net language, *any* language, and get started. VB.Net is a fine
>> language, you will love it after not too long.
>>
>> I would suggest that you take a course at your local college. This gives you immediate projects to
>> complete, homework that has to be done, other students to learn with etc.
>>
>> > Let me tell you I have been struggling with VB.Net. I am pretty proficient in getting Access to
>> do what I want. Now I have to learn a whole new bag of tricks. It didn't help that some of the
>> first tutorials I looked at kept trying to show me how to display "Hello World" on the console.
>>
>> It is a bit frustrating at first, partly because it is tough to do the database stuff until you
>> get comfortable with the environment itself. We all want to start at virtuoso and that definitely
>> ain't happening with .Net.
>>
>> If you haven't already, join the vb list. A lot of the .Net only stuff goes by on that list.
>>
>> John W. Colby
>> www.ColbyConsulting.com
>>
>> On 1/11/2011 1:28 PM, Tony Septav wrote:
>>
>>> Hey All
>>> Happy New Year.
>>> Well after reading your online intriquing and interesting chats and advice I have decided
>>> 1. To finally get my Web Page (I designed it over 2 years ago) up and running. It is nothing fancy
>>> but how can I be a credible programmer when I can't direct a client to my Web Page.
>>> 2. Start learning VB.Net. I know some of you favour VB.C+ but I am an old dog and I didn't want to
>>> tackle any thing too foreign. I hope to have my first application out of here by the end of January.
>>> Just kidding.
>>> Let me tell you I have been struggling with VB.Net. I am pretty proficient in getting Access to do
>>> what I want. Now I have to learn a whole new bag of tricks. It didn't help that some of the first
>>> tutorials I looked at kept trying to show me how to display "Hello World" on the console. I finally
>>> found one that showed me how to link to an Acess MDB and design a form with navigation, add new and
>>> delete buttons. So now I am off and running. I still get frustrated because I know what I want to do
>>> but at this point I don't know how to do it in VB.Net. But I keep remembering something I read years
>>> ago. It went something like this.
>>> Ted and Paul are having a conversation. Paul says "I would really like to learn how to play the
>>> piano, but I hear it takes about 5 years to really learn how to play it well, I just don't think I
>>> have the time". Ted thinks about it for a moment and then realizes that Paul had said the same thing
>>> to him 5 years ago.
>>> So hopefully I can persevere and catch up to you guys. I just hope it doesn't take me 5 years.
>>
>