On Tuesday I spent the day at TNX: Exchange. TNX: Exchange was a full day event, hosted by Microsoft Technet, about their messaging applications and mobile workforce tools.

They covered some interesting areas – including using Sharepoint Services and Sharepoint Portal, Exchange 2003 (and SP2), Windows Mobile 5 and Live Communication Server. (more…)

One of my projects involves a simple, but large Access database and some automated report creation tools using Microsoft Excel. Yesterday our sales guy e-mailed me a couple new bugs to work through.

The first one was confusing. The code would run a query, open a recordset, then export the record count (rst.recordcount) to a cell in the database. Should be simple, but for some reason the answer was always 1. Even when there were 6000 records in the recordset.

After a bunch of head scratching, I figured out that you need to move through the cursor first (rst.movelast). There’s a head scratcher – the need to do this probably makes great sense to some people, but it seems silly to me.

As I moved to the next bug, I ran into something completely different. My Excel export routines suddenly stopped working and report “Error 430″ – an “automation interface does not exist” error. Having not changed ANYTHING in those routines in 4 months, it seems unlikely that I broke it.

I checked a version of the product form 6 months ago – one that’s fully tested and I know works. It’s broken now too. It looks like my something on my PC has changed – possibly it’s time to reinstall Office 2003.

I’m sending the application to someone else for testing first. What fun Microsoft products can be! (I’ll post more when I’ve fixed the problem)

2006/01/27 – Reinstalling Office 2003 and SP2 did not fix the problem. No version of the application works on my laptop (I tried 3 versions), but it works fine on the sales guy’s PC. Time to restore to my “clean” image!

2006/01/28 – Would you believe Corel Draw 12 was the culprit?  It breaks the automation so thoroughly that even an uninstall doesn’t fix it.  Annoying – since I was starting to love using Corel – it’s much cooler than Illustrator.

On Monday afternoon, the building one of my clients is in lost power. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal. Their UPS would tell their servers to shut down, and all would be good. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. Their UPS failed, and their Windows 2003 Small Business Server shut down in a rather dirty fashion.

Once power was restored, I managed to get into the machine and see what kind of damage was done. Normally, I wouldn’t have worried at all – but this client seems to have the worst luck when it comes to systems.

My worries were well proven. Exchange couldn’t mount the private message store. Some quick digging with ESEUtil showed that the store had shut down dirty (which it should have recovered from), but was missing one of the transaction log files.

Bad news. With that log file missing, it’s pretty unlikely to get the store mounted without some data loss. (more…)