Far from cookie-cutter apps!
VisualCE Enterprise Edition 6.1
INTRODUCTION
A few years ago, I was a pretty
good Paradox for Windows Developer.
In fact, I had an article published in Paradox
Informant Magazine in December of 1995 on a series
of applications I wrote to help Quality Assurance
Managers with their ISO 9000 implementations.
It was called Quality System Administration
(QSA), and had Corrective Action, Corrective Action
Escalation, Calibration and Internal Auditing modules
in it. It
was pretty cool.
After I got done with that, I put in a POS System
for a pawnshop in Round Lake Beach, IL, and a Movie
Rental POS system for a small mom and pop-shop video
store in Grayslake, IL.
I also wrote a Music Catalog and Performance
application for a church I attended.
It helped them keep track of all of the songs
that were on the church band play list, and allowed
the music minister to create a weekly play list for
the Sunday Service.
All of these were done under Paradox for Windows 5.x.
I had the Runtime for it, and was a programming
fool. After
1997, I started a job at a medical device manufacturer,
and the RDBMS consulting fell to the wayside.
I haven’t really slung a line of ObjectPAL
in over 5 years.
For kicks, I had Sherman set the WayBack Machine for
a quick jaunt to the past and began skipping tra-la
through my Paradox files and came across an application
that really saved my butt a couple of times when I
was looking for a new job.
In 1996, I found myself out of work and my wife pregnant
with our second child.
I needed to find a job in a hurry.
I needed to get serious, and began flooding
the Chicagoland area with résumé’s and responded to
gazillions of job adds in the paper.
I shot résumé’s to headhunters, and passed
them out to friends and neighbors.
If I shook your hand, you came away with a
resume. It
was getting out of hand.
Knowing what I knew about Paradox for Windows, I decided
to write an application that would help me keep track
of all of the résumé’s and stuff.
It took me a while, but the result was called
Jobs: The Job Search Manager. It’s a cool little contact manager, specifically oriented around
finding a job.
With it you can manage employment opportunities, networking
contacts, job sources, and keep track of all your
activities around all of those.
You can print cover letters, cold call letters;
and address and return address labels.
It will even print a list of all of the people
you contacted, interviewed with, etc. in IL. DoEmp
compliant format for unemployment insurance benefits.
Hey, I DID have a little bit of time on my
hands…
During my trip through the past, I decided that this
app would make a great Pocket PC application.
All I needed was a Development Environment
and a second degree in Computer Science.
I don’t program in any other language other
than ObjectPAL.
I never meant to learn programming.
It just kinda happened while creating QSA,
because I was using it as I wrote it.
This is where VisualCE Professional comes in, kids.
With it, you can create form based applications
for your Pocket PC.
It comes in a number of different configurations,
Lite, Personal, Professional and Enterprise editions,
each supporting incremental, and enhanced features
over the lesser version.
You don’t need to program at all to use ANY
of the editions, even Professional and Enterprise
editions, with the possible exception of utilizing
the more advanced features of mEnable.
However, to take advantage of the more advanced
features in the Professional and Enterprise editions,
you WILL need to have a firm understanding of Relational
Databases, Data Normalization Rules, and form based
applications. If you aren’t that gifted, don’t worry. You won’t get left out in the cold, its just
going to take you longer to get to the good
stuff. However,
getting there for the RDBMS Newbie could take a while.
It all depends on you.
So come on, kids… Come follow me along my journey
to create PocketJobs 1.0.
You’ll be able to gage for yourself if VisualCE
can help you solve some of your application needs
along the way.
WHAT'S
HOT
VisualCE version 6.0 was released
days before I started this review.
In the three or so weeks since then, VisualCE
has been updated to version 6.1.
This point release was done to facilitate two
features.
-
New Enterprise Installation System
While it’s really nothing to write home about, in my mind this is a cool deal. Until version 6.1, Syware distributed VisualCE Enterprise Edition as 3 separate files. As you’ll note in the Setup section, below, this was a problem for me. The installation system has all of the Enterprise components bundled together into a single install app that launches the installer for each individual component.
