The Best Web Development Choice I Ever Made!

The Evolution of My Web Development Environment

The Early Days: Manual Setup

When I first dipped my toes into Web Development, I embraced the challenge of manually installing and configuring PHP, Apache, and MySQL on my Windows machine. It was a steep learning curve, but it worked, and I felt accomplished.

The VM Era: Convenience and Performance

As time passed, I discovered the power of virtual machines (VMs). I started with Windows Virtual PC, later adopting user-friendly solutions like XAMPP and WampServer. This setup served me well, and I eventually upgraded to VMWare for better virtualization.

The Performance Dilemma

However, the arrival of Windows 10 and VMWare 14-15 brought an unexpected challenge: a significant drop in performance. Simple tasks that once took milliseconds now lagged for 5-8 seconds. Switching to VirtualBox offered some improvement, but it never matched the speed I remembered from less powerful machines.

Frustrated, I spent countless hours attempting to tweak PHP, Apache, and MySQL settings, all to no avail. I tried creating fresh Windows 7, 10 & 11 machines, but the performance issues persisted in all cases, eating into my daily productivity and patience.
 
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Outlook Blocked Senders Junk Mail List

A while back I posted about using Outlook’s Junk Mail’s Blocked Senders listing to blocked known SPAMmers.

Blocking SPAM from Known Domains in Outlook
As per my previous posting on the subject, for some reason, I have been getting hit recently by SPAM. ... Now, originally, I would simply click on the Junk e-mail option to Block Sender.  The issue with this is that these SPAMmers never use the same e-mail account twice, so this is completely ineffective. So by examining the sources of the problem, we can…

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One thing I did not cover is how the dialog offers us the ability to Export and Import Blocked Sender lists.  As such, for what it is worth, I thought I’d simply share my list in case it can be used as a base for others.

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Get Notified When A Process Starts Using PowerShell

For a while now, I noticed a weird behavior on my PC where I’d see instances of iexplore.exe and ielowutil.exe running when I’d review my Task Manager’s list of processes. I’ve tried to understand where these were coming from as I haven’t used Internet Explorer in a long time.

What perplexed me even more, is I was able to see the same behavior with a client’s PC that I performed a fresh install of Windows on.

So I was looking for a way to identify when the process(es) were initiated and decided on PowerShell because it is baked into Windows so available.
 
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How to Address Corruption in Microsoft Access Databases

Database corruption can be a significant issue for Microsoft Access users, potentially leading to data loss and operational disruptions. I will attempt to outline some of the steps you can use to diagnose and address potential corruption in your Access database, as well as tools that can assist in the recovery process.
 
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How-to Check If A RecordSet Is Open Or Closed?

I was helping out in a forum where someone asked the question of:

… check to determine the the recordset is closed or still open.

Now, in their specific case, the real issue was logic and reorganizing the code would entirely eliminate this need, but I still wanted to share a simple solution for anyone else out there that wanted to do the same thing.
 
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Merging PDFs Together Using VBA

A while back, I shared an example of how we could use the power of Modern Web Browser Control (MWBC) to Merge and Split PDF files.

Merging PDFs Together Using VBA
A while back, I shared an example of how we could use the power of Modern Web Browser Control (MWBC) to Merge and Split PDF files. With ths approach, you could even fully automate the process. That said, I also know that many do not like the MWBC and prefer more traditional solutions and so I thought I’d very briefly touch upon them in this post as I was just answering a question related to this issue in a discussion forum. I thought I’d quickly just touch upon some possible other approaches. Adobe Acrobat I think everyone is aware that…

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Access Modern Web Browser Control – Splitting PDFs
As promised in my previous post regarding merging PDFs together using the new Access Modern Web Browser control: This post is about splitting/extracting a set of pages from a PDF.  

With either of these approaches, you could even fully automate the process. That said, I also know that many do not like the MWBC and prefer more traditional solutions and so I thought I’d very briefly touch upon them in this post as I was just answering a question related to this issue in a discussion forum.
 
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Mastering Microsoft Access’ DLookUp Function

Outside of queries, DLookup is another built-in versatile and essential function in Microsoft Access that allows users to retrieve specific field values from tables or queries based on a defined criteria. This function is particularly useful when you need to access data that isn’t directly available in your current form, report, or query.
 

Syntax and Structure

The basic syntax of the DLookup function is as follows:

DLookup(expr, domain, [criteria])
  • expr
    The field or expression you want to retrieve.
  • domain
    The table or query name containing the data.
  • criteria
    Optional. The criteria to filter the records with.

 
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How to Create a Compiled MDE/ACCDE File Of Using VBA

If you’re like me, you’re always looking for ways to streamline and simplify your work. To that end, I long ago started developing a routine to take databases I develop and ‘configure’ them for deployment. What type of thing does my code do?

  • Adds a password (if applicable)
  • Disables things like the Shift Bypass, Special Keys, …
  • Performs a backup
  • Creates a compiled version of the db (mde/accde)
  • …

It is that last point that I thought I’d share with you today.
 
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