VBA '95 - The Heeler's View
by VB the Heeler
MS Product Manager Peter Moore (left) certainly had an impressive opening address
in store for us. Allegedly an overview of the new Microsoft products including VB4,
although the undoubted highlight was the Australian debut of the VB4 Rap. Put
together by the VB4 devlopment team, the rap is an amusing piece of music
indeed - but don't give up your day jobs guys. There was even some intention
of putting a .wav version on disk to delegates, but I suspect that the powers
that be were somewhat shocked by the 4MB compressed size of the file...
Mark Trescowthick, self-appointed judge of the Great Debate, seemed strangely
out of touch in providing his adjudications. While it may have been true that
the Aussies got close in Melbourne (with debate topic - "we should not use the
API unless absolutely necessary" - a sensible topic which naturally turned into
a ridiculed one), even the audience-impaired could surely have detected the
pro-US feeling in Sydney. Nevertheless the Aussies (represented by Ansett’s
Mark Henry and GUI’s Tony Goodhew and Jim Karabatsos)
won both. The USA’s Gary Wisniewski, Jonathan Zuck and Rick Hargrove (left) were, this dog
thinks, badly done by.
Wonderful to watch GUI Supremo Mark Trescowthick’s face during his Closing
Remarks in Sydney. The heavyweights (Karabatsos, Goodhew and Zuck - left) had banded
together to create a remote OLE server in VB4 which emulated his PowerPoint
background slide. It had the extra feature of enabling Jonathan Zuck to control
a text box on screen - which was used to great effect. Jonathan was connected to
the presentation PC via a piece of standard ethernet. The only flaw in the plan
was that the foldback monitor was left on. Eventually, even Mark is going to notice
big yellow sendups appearing on his monitor.
Multimedia presenter Scott Porter made an interesting discovery during VBA : with the full version of PowerPoint ‘95 running, most video codecs, etc simply don’t work. Unfortunately for Scott, he made this discovery just before his session...
VBA organiser Cathy Conte made an interesting discovery too, though this one was
made at the after-party in Sydney. It seems that flaming sambuccas can be dangerous.
At least, the burns on Cathy’s hand and the tablecloth would tend to indicate so...
