Hi FullName,
This message brings you good news from ProgrammingMSAccess.com. I have a lot of exciting, great news to tell you about so this message is longer than normal. In particular, you'll learn about new free software from Microsoft (the new Express suite) and how to make better use of that software with offerings from this site -- namely through my book and seminar presentations. In addition, I also remind you about SPAM Blocker from ProgrammingMSAccess.com. If you use Outlook 2000, 2002, or 2003, this may be a good solution for dramatically reducing the amount of spam that ends up in your Inbox.
This message covers five distinct points. Follow the links below to jump to the headings in the message that especially appeal to you.
Microsoft is giving away database development software
In coordination with its release of SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft released a suite of new software programs that are FREE. The free stuff is part of the Express suite. Readers of this newsletter will probably be most interested in SQL Server 2005 Express, Visual Basic 2005 Express, and Visual Web Developer 2005 Express. You can use all three of these Express suite applications to build great Windows and Web database applications. New graphical tools make it possible to create lots of useful database functionality without writing a single line of code. Of course, you can leverage the graphical tools and create much better apps by writing a few lines of code. For those who like the freedom that code provides to express yourself, you'll be interested in knowing that you can program these Express suite apps with Visual Basic 2005, ASP.NET 2.0, ADO.NET 2.0, T-SQL, and even more programming options.
So what's the difference between the free stuff in the Express suite and the stuff that cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars in Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005? One significant distinction is that the Express suite does not target enterprise apps. For example, SQL Server 2005 has some high-end server and database management features that are not available with SQL Server 2005 Express. Besides that SQL Server 2005 Express supports just one processor, but SQL Server 2005 supports multiple processors. Neither Visual Basic Express nor Visual Web Developer Express explicitly supports development teams. However, both packages work well for lone developers (or business professionals) creating solutions for small organizations or departments and branch offices in larger organizations. The new Express suite components are great for educational institutions because the students can acquire the software on their own for free at least through early November 2007 (SQL Server 2005 Express is free indefinitely).
You can learn more about these packages, including how to download them from the Microsoft site from the following link.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/.
Learn to use Express suite packages with my new book
Because I know many of my site's visitors create solutions primarily for small organizations or departments and branch offices in larger organizations, I purposely prepared a book on creating database solutions with SQL Server 2005 Express, Visual Basic Express, and Visual Web Developer Express. The title of the book is "Beginning SQL Server 2005 Express Database Applications with Visual Basic Express and Visual Web Developer Express". As the title states, this is a beginning book. It does not cover every feature of the three packages mentioned in the title, but it does cover a broad range of features. Furthermore, the features that are covered are supported with code samples and step-by-step instructions that explain how to use them.
If you have not used .NET or SQL Server previously, but you are curious about how to use the new free software from Microsoft, this book can ramp you up the learning curve. The book is also appropriate for those who have experimented with .NET and SQL Server, but still view themselves as learning these applications. The only group the book is explicitly not for is those who have fully mastered the prior versions of .NET and SQL Server and are looking exclusively to find out how to master all of the new and most advanced features in these packages. Of course, if you are such a developer, chances are you should be using Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 instead of the Express suite packages.
Although my new book is for beginners, it contains plenty of valuable content that can make you a very productive user of SQL Server Express, Visual Basic Express, or Visual Web Developer Express. The first part of the book drills down on SQL Server Express with in-depth coverage of T-SQL. The code samples in this part of the book cover creating queries, performing data manipulation, as well as copying and backing up databases. You'll also learn how to program your own T-SQL code modules in stored procedures, views, user-defined functions, and even triggers. The second part of the book presents Visual Basic Express and Visual Web Developer Express in such a way as to prepare you for creating database applications. Then, the book explicitly examines programmatic and graphical approaches to performing a wide range of database tasks with Visual Basic Express and Visual Web Developer Express. Many readers will especially appreciate coverage of how to create database solutions for Windows forms and Web forms.
My site features numerous resources for the book, including a detailed table of contents, a FAQs page, and a link for buying the book. The FAQs page covers selected general topics about the technology as well as the book. You can reach these resources from the Book's section at the site.
Train to use Express suite packages from seminar presentations
Those of you who have been visiting my site over the past several years know that a major event each year is our annual seminar presentations. This year we are offering three presentations of a 21-hour training seminar on SQL Server Express, Visual Basic Express, and Visual Web Developer Express. Seminars provide a richer form of interaction that can efficiently complement the resources available in a book.
In my seminars, you will derive many benefits not available from my books. First and foremost, is the ability to ask questions and to hear the answers to your questions as well as those of your fellow seminar participants. We offer a toll-free conference telephone number to seminar participants from the US and Canada. Seminar participants from other countries will be able to dial into a special international telephone conference number. Charges for calls originating outside the US or Canada are not covered as part of the seminar fee. Another major benefit of attending a live seminar is that you will be able to see sample applications work right in your browser. Seminar participants will receive a CD with all samples demonstrated during the seminar to help them reproduce the demos in the seminar.
We offer the 21 hours of training during daytime or evening hours. The daytime presentations are available during either Eastern Time (New York City) or Pacific Time (San Francisco). The evening presentations are available during Central Time (Chicago). While the times are obviously suitable for US and Canadian participants from coast to coast, the presentation times are also convenient for participants from other countries. For example, our evening presentation hours on Central Time occur during normal business hours for those from either England or Australia. We already have an Australian registrant who selected the presentations during the Pacific Time.
You can learn all the details about the seminar including what topics are covered, how participants responded to prior seminars, how little it cost to attend, what you get for registering, and how to register from the seminar web site.
As I mentioned, the seminar is one of the most important events sponsored by the site. As a result, I regularly recruit other sites and organizations to help get the word out about our seminar presentations. This year, three web sites and one organization agreed to co-promote the seminar. This section honors the seminar co-promoters. In addition, this section is an invitation to those of you who have web sites or organizations to become a co-promoter so that we can honor your organization or web site in a future edition of this newsletter.
Apress, the publisher of my most recent book, is co-promoting the seminar by giving away a copy of the book to each seminar registrant. The seminar will closely, but not exactly, follow the book. Therefore, the book will serve as an excellent resource for reviewing techniques presented during the seminar. In addition, the book will go into many more details than I am able to cover during the seminar. As a thank you to Apress for donating the book prizes for each registrant, there is a link on the web site's banner. We invite you to visit Apress to purchase my book as well as books by other expert authors.
The three web sites co-promoting the seminar are vb123.com, databasedev.co.uk, and AndreaVB Programming & Downloads. Each of these sites features a rich array of content for anyone creating database solutions or programming with Microsoft software. I encourage you to visit these sites to learn more about the content that they make available to database and programming professionals. The seminar site features a co-promoters page with click-through links to all seminar co-promoters. The overall site lists information about several sites that I believe you will find of interest on its Favorites page, but our co-promoters appear towards the top of our Favorites page.
If you have already featured the seminar at your site, please send me a message with the page. I will be glad to add your site to the seminar's co-promoters page and feature a special mention to your site in the next edition of this newsletter. If you have not already added information about my seminar to your site and you want to serve your visitors with a notice about my seminar, please let me know. I can help you with either a word summary and a link for our seminar or a click-through animated .gif file. Thanks, in advance, for helping to get the word out about the seminar.
SPAM Blocker from ProgrammingMSAccess.com filters spam
SPAM Blocker from ProgrammingMSAccess.com is how I filter spam email. I wouldn't make it available if it didn't work for me. My site has been offering different versions of SPAM Blocker for over three years. Just about a year and a half ago, I came to the conclusion that the best way to filter spam was to refresh the filters as often as possible. As a consequence, the site offers a refreshed version of SPAM Blocker about twice per month. BTW, I just updated the filters for SPAM Blocker -- so they have never been better at filtering spam!
SPAM Blocker runs as VBA code in back of Microsoft Outlook. Because Outlook Express does not support VBA, SPAM Blocker from ProgrammingMSAccess.com does not work with Outlook Express. You might be wondering how could anything as simple as a VBA program really block spam. The answer is that the SPAM Blocker looks just about everywhere in a message to figure out if it is spam. In addition, we use a huge number of filters and special programmatically-based filtering techniques. Furthermore, I am constantly adding new filters and dropping old ones that are no longer necessary or are discovered to block non-spam email messages. About twice per month, I publish the results for licensed SPAM Blocker users. Our filters block commercial spam, vulgarity, phishing schemes, identity theft frauds, nuisance messages, and more.
You can buy our spam filtering application in a variety of ways. However, any way that you get SPAM Blocker from ProgrammingMSAccess.com always delivers the site's best, most current set of filters. In order to keep the price especially low for one SPAM Blocker edition, you can purchase it without the option to download new filters. We offer other versions that let you download fresh filters for 1, 2, 3 years. The longer your license, the less you pay per year.
This message was not brief, but I hope that you found reading it a worthwhile use of your time. The real value of this edition of the ProgrammingMSAccess.com newsletter message is that it provides links to some especially valuable site resources that can make you more productive in 2006 and beyond. The links direct you to free software from Microsoft, my book which describes how to use that software, my seminar that can personally train you to use the free software, and SPAM Blocker, which can save you hundreds of hours per year by filtering spam. Please take a moment to forward copies of this message to your friends who can benefit from the topics presented in this message. After receiving this message, your friends can arrange to get their own copy of our newsletter by signing the site's Guest Book.
As usual, I close by reminding you that if you no longer wish to receive messages from ProgrammingMSAccess.com, just reply with Remove in Subject field.
Rick