• The built-in email functionality will not be reliable on Windows 2000, XP and 2003 as it depends on MAPI which was superceded by newer Microsoft messaging objects. For MAPI to work, you will need to have Microsoft Outlook installed on the same machine. The reference: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;238085. Any Outlook version will do, including Outlook 2003 as indicated by this reference. This said, correspondent Colin Millard of Surrey, British Columbia wrote me: "I found the email window useful, to see how using MAPI could be used to send e-mail, I have used my application on Windows 2000 with no problems to send to multiple e-mail address with up to three attachments". Thanks for writing, Colin!



• The application was designed to run only one instance at a time. If you intend to run multiple instances of the application at the same time and to share updates between the two instances, you need to add explicit "commits" to the SQL statements. With Powerbuilder and Access, this normally happens automatically when you close the application.
  
  
• On Windows XP only, the "Billable" label in the main window becomes ":Billable" (with a preceding colon character). This is a cosmetic bug which does not go away even if you go CONTROL PANEL > DISPLAY > select "Windows Classic" theme. Cause is unknown. Workaround I would suggest is to recompile on XP, let me know how that works out if you try that. On NT4, the same window looks like this:

• It only supports MAPI for sending email. It does not support CDONTS or CDO. If you have managed to make such code work without resorting to newer versions of Powerbuilder, I would be very interested in seeing how;



• It's a client-server app using ODBC, rather than the more convenient ADO. ODBC forces you to create a data source in the Control Panel, which requires both administrator privileges if you are using Windows 2000, as well as coding prowess if you are using an installer program. Initially, I created a nice installer program using the Wise product, but it was flawed in that it would not install the data source correctly if the Windows or Winnt root directory was not on the C: drive. For this reason I dropped the installer completely. To install, simply copy the files to a directory, and review the file "Manual ODBC Install.txt";



• Also because of ODBC, this application is limited to Windows database server machines, although there has been some talk of Linux ODBC interfaces that would be fabulous to get working with Powerbuilder (myODBC and unixODBC);



• It opens a separate Windows task bar item for each window opened.

• Send email (like I mentioned before);



• Open Internet browser windows directly from the app;



• Call several Windows API functions (for sound, timers, file handling, and opening the HTML help file);



• Print nested datawindows (this is the feature that should get you all excited);



• Create an HTML web page dump of a client list with navigation anchors;



• Allow the creation of new database items through the use of editable dropdown list controls on the main page and the client page (see to-do's concerning these);



• Round seconds to minutes using different schemes;



• Center and maximize a window;



• Obfuscate (should not say encrypt) a password using a simple scheme -- if you are a serious organization don't even think of using this!

• When creating a new client using the editable dropdown list controls on the main page, if a "last name comma first name" is entered, parse out the first name and enter it in the appropriate column. Currently the entire entry is inserted in the last name column. This is pretty easy to do, I just plain forgot to do it is all;



• Create a few reports;



• Apply the term change for "State" in the client window's menu (forgot that one);



• When deleting a client, refresh the main window's client dropdown to reflect the change;



• Change the "Save Settings" and "Clear Settings" buttons in the Audit window to a simple "Remember these settings" checkbox;

More recent software development projects:



"BabyTalk"

(open source Java text-to-speech desktop app)



"BabyTalk Web"

(open source Java text-to-speech desktop app using Java

Web Services and the Simpletext SQL database)



"Quadmore Java to Microsoft SAPI bridge for Windows "

(free Windows dynamic link library which allows a Sun Java

program to access text-to-speech and speech recognition

functionality provided by the Microsoft Speech API)