Ask the MultiValued Visual
Basic Expert - #7
(as published in Spectrum
magazine Nov/Dec 1997)
updated Sept.
22, 1997
To email your questions to "Ask the MultiValued VB
Expert", click here.
Copyright © 1997 Caduceus Consulting. All rights reserved.
News Groups
The time has come for me to add a GUI
front-end to my MultiValue database. Visual Basic seems to be the
most popular language, but lately I've been hearing a lot about
Delphi. Which do you think is better?
I want to move my old 'Pick' applications on
to an NT box. There are now at least four flavors available:
uniVerse, D3, mvBASE, and Unidata. Any recommendations?
My company sells packaging products, not
computers. The guy who sold us our Pick-based software is going
out of business. We have no money for a high-priced consultant.
Where can we go for help?
Patience, gentle reader - I know what you're
thinking: what have the last two questions got to do with Visual
Basic? Answer: not much. Given a shortage of VB-specific
questions this month, I decided to branch out a bit. To tell the
truth, I hear questions like the above three all the time. As a
consultant, I get to define my position on these points
privately, but instead of making those opinions public here, I'm
going to tell you how you can get the answers yourself. (After
all, this is not supposed to be an opinion column.)
The Answers are Out There
This month's article is devoted to the Internet
news groups. Now before any of you neophyte or dyed-in-the-wool
Wyse 50 users leave this page, let me tell you that if you have
never read the postings to the 'Pick' news group, what I'm going
to tell you may just change your life. I mean it. The news
groups are a public forum for a sharing of ideas on a common
topic. One in particular should have relevance to every reader of
this magazine. It is called "comp.databases.pick" (or "CDP" for the news-junkies). When
you read your first postings from that news group, you'll feel
like you've just joined the most amazing self-help group for
Pick. It is a worldwide collection of the most knowledgeable
people in the industry AND newcomers who are at least savvy
enough to know where to go to ask questions. In other words,
people just like yourself. There you will find (right now, in
fact) a variety of on-going discussions that answer this month's
questions, and a lot more.
And just in case you don't know where to begin,
I am going to tell you exactly what to do. For those of
you who already regular news readers, stick around - you might
just pick up a useful tip or two.
How it All Works
We will begin at the beginning. Back in the
80's, before there was an Internet or World Wide Web, there was
Usenet. Usenet was (and is) the official name for the newsgroup
system. Usenet is entirely text-based - there are no inherent
graphics or fancy fonts (although some newsgroups are now devoted
to binary data that is still sent as text). Each news posting
comes in three parts: a heading describing the topic, the main
body with the text of the posting, and assorted control data
telling who posted it, etc. Here's how it works:
- A group of users decide that they would
like to create a newsgroup to discuss a particular area
of interest. [There is now an official process, too
lengthy to describe here, that they must go through to
register a new newsgroup. CDP had many postings recently
from supporters and detractors of establishing a group
specifically for Advanced Revelation users.] Newsgroups
are named based on a hierarchy of increasingly focused
interests. In other words, readers of
"comp.lang" may discuss computer languages in
general, "comp.lang.basic" readers discuss the
BASIC language, and "comp.lang.basic.visual"
deals with Visual Basic, and so on.
- The newsgroup name is added to a list of
all active newsgroups (around 20,000 at my last count),
most (but by no means all) interacting in English.
- If you wish to access the newsgroup, you
will need a 'news reader' application installed on your
PC and have some kind of access to Usenet or the
Internet. Some browsers (e.g. Netscape) have built-in
news readers. Others are available for free (or with more
features for a small fee) from web sites. I personally
recommend "Agent" (or it's free cousin:
"Free Agent"), available at www.forteinc.com.
- You then 'subscribe' to the newsgroup.
Note that there is NO commitment here: no fees, no name
added to any list - you are simply telling your news
reader application to get the latest postings for the
'subscribed' newsgroup.
- When you are connected to the Internet,
your news reader can retrieve the latest postings for all
of the newsgroups that you subscribe to. Often the
headings are downloaded first so that you may select
which postings you would like to see the many body of.
The content of all of the possible newsgroups is stored
on a 'news server' which is usually maintained by your
Internet Service Provider (ISP). In order to deal with
the massive volume of postings every day, most ISP's will
keep a new posting on-line for about one week only. (I'll
tell you how you can find it after that - read on.)
- Newsgroup postings are organized into
discussion 'threads'. Let us assume that you read a
posted question and wish to post a response, or you read
an article that you feel compelled to comment on. Using
your news reader, you can post your own posting back to
the newsgroup. So long as you don't change the heading
data (like the 'subject' line for email), your post will
eventually be circulated around the globe and appear
along with other responses in the original thread. You
can easily start you own thread (to post your own
question for instance) by typing in your own heading.
That's all there is to it. You can then read
about other real MultiValue users and developers, their
experiences, their questions and answers, their discoveries,
their job searches, their narrow-minded opinions - it's all
there. You will likely be surprised by just how much is happening
all around you.
How to Catch Up
I can't wrap up this month's column without
giving you more direct access to the opening questions. I told
you that they were in comp.databases.pick, but a
week has already gone by and you may have missed the threads. So
here's the best part, and YOU DON'T EVEN NEED A NEWS READER! Run,
don't walk, to www.dejanews.com. That web
site has all the news that has ever been (some not fit to print,
of course). Searching it for a topic is dead easy, and you can
even follow the whole original thread. See you in CDP!
To email your questions to "Ask the MultiValued VB
Expert", click here.
Copyright © 1997 Caduceus Consulting. All rights reserved.
Revised: September 22, 1997.
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