Another Day, Another Deleted Feedback Portal Suggestion!

Microsoft Feedback

A little over a year ago I wrote an article regarding retrieving a database object’s created and modified date/times:

Microsoft Access - Object - Created and Modified Dates
Microsoft Access - Get Object Created Or Modified Date/Time
Getting the Creation Date/Time So have you ever tried to retrieve the Created Date/Time. Pretty easy right as there are a couple ways to attack this! You can simply query the MSysObjects table: Or perhaps use DAO Containers and Documents:   Getting the Last Modified Date/Time But what about the Modified Date/Time? So you would think that we could simply modify the above query of the MSysObjects table to: Or the DAO Containers and Documents to: But those are not reliable and don’t always work properly! (especially for Forms and Reports). Instead, they seem to return the Created Date/Time again.…

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In it, I detailed that the Last Modified properties was in fact unreliable and hence there was a bug.

So, at the end of the article, I included a link to a Feedback Portal suggestion I created about the issue in the hopes Microsoft would decided to fix this issue for us all.

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The Battle Over Intellectual Property And AI Heats Up Over At Stack OverFlow!

As a regular contributor to this blog, YouTube and various forums I was surprised to learn that Stack Overflow decided to partner with OpenAI and thus is “transferring” contribution to their use.

You can view the company’s announcement at:

Stack Overflow and OpenAI Partner to Strengthen the World’s Most Popular Large Language Models - Press release - Stack Overflow
Founded in 2008, Stack Overflow’s public platform is used by nearly everyone who codes to learn, share their knowledge, collaborate, and build their careers.
API Partnership with Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow and OpenAI today announced a new API partnership that will empower developers with the collective strengths of the world’s leading knowledge platform for highly technical content with the world’s most popular LLM models for AI development.

Many are opposed to this form of use of their contributions.

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SHERTACK Tech Scam – A Warning For Others

Well, I had a fun afternoon yesterday!

I received a phone call from a family member informing me something was up with my father’s PC.

I connected to find remote access to his PC, all his antivirus, anti-malware programs removed…. then to boot, he was on the phone with the scammers!

I started by getting him to hang up on them, but they’re persistent and called back numerous times thereafter.

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OpenDBDiff – Dangers Lurking Around The Corner

I’ve been doing some work which involves comparing a couple databases to identify differences so I could get them all in sync.

I decided to test out a program I found a while back OpenDBDiff

GitHub - OpenDBDiff/OpenDBDiff: A database comparison tool for Microsoft SQL Server 2005+ that reports schema differences and creates a synchronization script.
A database comparison tool for Microsoft SQL Server 2005+ that reports schema differences and creates a synchronization script. - OpenDBDiff/OpenDBDiff

 

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Windows Virus Threat Action Bug

Software Bug

This is an issue I encountered a while back and just never got around to posting about, but when I was playing around with the Modern Web Browser control and trying to find a technique to accelerate loading local files I messed around with my Hosts file. This is also something I do when doing web development work.

Shortly after editing the Hosts files, and authorizing the access through UAC and with Administrative privileges none the less, I received:

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Thank You The Smiley Coder!

For years now, I have been directing developers towards “The Smiley Coder”‘s exceptional Microsoft Access Crash Reporter which was a tool you could integrate into your database to provide error reporting at the next level! Best of all, he had provided it for FREE, even had a dedicated Webpage and a supporting YouTube video.

Today, wanting to redirect someone in a forum to his exceptional tool, I went to his site to grab the URL only to discover it was no more!  If we check the domain registration, we discover it expired: 2024-02-28.

I had long included it in my Microsoft Access Database Add-ins, Tools, Etc. article and even had a dedicated posting about the Crash Reporter because it was that good!

So, I simply wanted to take a moment to thank The Smiley Coder (Anders) for everything he did (Crash Reporter, TreeView tutorials, Forum support, … & just all around nice guy) for the Access community for decades!!!

Wishing you all the best in whatever you have chosen to put your energies into now.

Saving His Blog
I did reach out to Anders to save all his blog content and add it here (maybe take an 1hr to complete), but was informed another MVP had already been working on it. So, at some point down the road, we should see it reappear which is great news for the Access community.

If/when I’m made aware of it, I will update my links at that point in time.

How-to Change a Table Field’s Data Type

I thought I’d share a function a created a while back to help a forum user out who wanted to update the data type of all matching table fields throughout their database.

So, yes, we could manually alter the data type via the Table Designer.

Obviously, we could perform such an operation using SQL using an SQL Statement following the basic syntax of:

ALTER TABLE [YourTableName] ALTER COLUMN [YourColumnName] YourDesiredDataType;

Therefore, a concrete example would be:

ALTER TABLE [Contacts] ALTER COLUMN [Active] INT;

But this will need to be performed manually for every matching field in every database table of interest. The goal was to create a VBA procedure to perform this command on every instance.

Easy enough!

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How-to Send E-mails Via Gmail Using The Google API

So this post goes hand in had with my post

How-to Send E-mails Via Outlook Using The Microsoft Graph API
Well, unless you’ve been living under a rock, by now, you are aware of some fundamental changes coming to Outlook in the not too distant future, mainly the fact that it will cease to support any form of VBA! Now, many have tried to make Microsoft reverse course, understand the millions of solutions (Access, Word, Excel, …) that will instantaneously break with such a switch, but there has been no change in course.  Actually, per the usual, there has been little to no response whatsoever. This brings us to today’s post!  

and was an attempt to find a solution to Microsoft Outlook dropping all VBA support when the ‘New Outlook’ is implemented.

So please start by reviewing the article above as it covers aspects that I won’t repeat here: Basic Authentication Flow, Making Requests, JSON, …
 
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