Mike Deasy

The DataWindow is the best gift Powersoft could have given to the development community. A primary marketing tool used to sell PowerBuilder, the DataWindow is the one you save for the end of the argument (and win), the exclamation point in the discussion with the VB guys. Why has no one dedicated a book to it until now? Over two years in the making, The Definitive DataWindow captures the essence of the DataWindow with countless little details that Brooks learned the hard way: working with Powersoft engineers, fighting it out in the trenches and trying to build the perfect application. His highly developed experiential knowledge forms the basis of this book. To quote from Little Man Tate, "It's not so much what he knows, but what he understands." It Spoke to Me... The first half of this book is fundamental, perhaps overly so. The first nine chapters cover information... (more)

Frenzy Projects - How To Survive A Season In The Lion's Den

I've recently been involved with several 'frenzy projects' - projects fueled by a sense of desperation. They have a psychotically myopic sense of purpose. These projects are known for large budgets, high profiles and very severe consequences if they don't go well. The sentiment among business users is, 'We don't care what it costs, just make it happen.' This happened all over America with Y2K projects, and it's happening now with companies doing e-business - enabled projects. Next month perhaps it will be a conversion to microscopic embedded databases. Here are some suggestions t... (more)

Cast 4.0 Adds Java and Oracle Objects to Reverse Engineering

The CAST workbench is a vital tool for our applications here at Williams Energy, and, in September 2000, I wrote a case study of how we applied the CAST workbench to our Natural Gas application to assist in learning about our object structure. This summer, CAST is going to release a newer version of the CAST workbench, and I've had a chance to look it over and run it through in advance. There are two primary new features. CAST has improved its support of Oracle database objects - which means PL/SQL stored procedures - and will now analyze your Java objects as well. The new versio... (more)

Does the Stupid Thing Work?

We have all seen them, all remember them - the IT office funnies. There was the Story of Creation as told to URK - a lovely reenactment of Genesis put together by hard-core mainframers. There was a document (prepared by individuals working in the defense industry) that had a hilarious list of acronyms, mostly defining the many ways that the worker bee was dumped upon. It was before Dilbert, before the blond jokes, even before we could IM each other with the latest classic comedy. It was simplicity itself. The "Does The Stupid Thing Work" flowchart (see Figure 1) showed you in no ... (more)

Holiday Greetings from Seattle - Jingle all the way . . .

Ahh, the holidays - time for warmth, family, a spirit of charity (or greed, depending on your wont), and days off. Many of us spend our holidays vacationing, shopping, worshipping, and trying to rekindle childhood memories or feelings. However, many of us computing professionals spend our holiday season in some other ways, don't we? Days in a Row One of the real problems with the holidays is that everyone is doing all of those previously mentioned things, so they're not at work. That, of course, opens up windows of time to perform all those processes we had trouble figuring out ... (more)