Universal apps

That don’t include Office? What sort of universe is that? not any business universe that I have been in.

“Start building Universal Windows Platform apps”

That was the tag line from the MS Visual Studio site.

I finally managed to get their virtual machine working (it’s 40 Gb fully expanded, not 20). It has Visual Studio alright, but no Office. I am amazed that MS do not see Office as a development target, or at least not enough to put a copy on their development trial virtual machine. unbelievable.

I might chuck a 30 day Office 2010 trial on it, I think I have one on a pen drive somewhere. All the other stuff needs an MS account, which is just too much like going back in time.

In other news Android studio 3.0 is just out, with Kotlin as a first class language. All free, and easily accessible.

Anyone else had a play with the MS dev vm I mentioned a few days ago?

Well that was underwhelming

 

Bothered my arse to download their 20 gigs of pap, and lo it doesn’t work.

Unfortunately I have hit my buggering around limit now so the only outcome I can note is that I tried their Win 10 dev environment and it didn’t work. It was shit in fact. waste of my time. I’d like tuppence back for my bandwidth please…

I accept I have probably done something wrong but I didn’t see any instructions to ignore.

It’s now stuck on ‘importing windev eval’ been there for two hours. A fail.

 

Cutting Excel out of your process

Some CFOs keen to see the end of Excel.

Why don’t these people understand? Excessive Excel is a symptom of crap systems. Normally caused by decades of underinvestment in IT and piss poor IT McMissManagement.

They made a cynical strategic decision to cut investment in IT and let end user ad-hoc analysis take up the slack. Now they want to eradicate (well hide) the symptom (well evidence).

And should the systems eventually catch up with requirements (even a little bit), those users have so little confidence in IT after decades of under delivery, and unreliability that they will continue to prefer their existing proven approach. surprisingly! (Thats assuming they are ever allowed sufficient access to do their job of course).

Anyone who thinks outsourcing and offshoring your IT will help this Excel eradication process, is a dumbarse. Not quite as dumb as the people who think the solution is a crack team of overpriced under-experienced fresh graduates posing as consultants, but nearly.

The obvious solution is a big integrated system, like say SAP. A couple of spotty yoofs should be able to get that up and running in a few weeks and it will solve everything. Even cheaper – get someone in a different timezone to do it. I would do it for them but I am tidying my sock drawer that day.

Its not a technology thing, putting your shitty inadequate systems in the cloud just make them less secure, and more available. And who needs more availability of crap data and irrelevant analysis?

The actual solution is a minimum of 10 years of high quality IT management to implement fit for purpose systems. So start today and in 2027 you will be sorted, call it 2028 to give you a few months to recruit that high quality management.

Free Win 10 Developer virtual machine

Our good friends at Microsoft are giving away time limited virtual machines with Win 10 and VS2017 on board. They expire mid Jan so don’t get locked out.

Its for developers to get up to speed with the latest and greatest. However there is no mention of full fat Office. So I guess its not for ALL developers. Unless its a given that developers need a proper office suite not a mickey mouse online one.

I’ll download it and take a proper look as soon as I find a device with 20 gigs of free space. If you look first let us know if it has proper Office with VBA (If so I might delete a load of shite off here to get it up and running)

cheers

VBA third most hated language

amongst Stack Overflow devs anyway…

On SO devs can mention tech they would rather avoid. Perl was top at being avoid worthy, then Delphi (is that even still alive??) followed closely by our own VBA.

This is developers so its not really a surprise they prefer to avoid VBA. They want to be playing with new shit not adding business value.

Interestingly SO reported that VBA is still an actively tagged language so still popular in use, just not by devs.

In fact, of those languages disliked by over 3% of mentions, VBA is the only one not shrinking in tag mentions, in fact its growing slightly.