Greetings!

Wow, the summer has blown by here. We hope you had a good one.

If you're in the New York area, I hope you can join me at next week's Microsoft Access User Group meeting in New York City.

Meanwhile, we're continuing to develop and enhance our products, and have few tips to share on some challenging issues we and our users encountered. The worst being the result of a Microsoft security update in mid-August that changed the Microsoft Common Control. The Microsoft KB article didn't give a reliable resolution but we discovered one. This was shared on our Facebook page as our investigations developed, so please Like our Facebook page to receive more timely information than we can share in our monthly newsletter.

Additionally, our Professional Solutions Group has created more custom solutions with Visual Studio .NET LightSwitch recently. Read about it below.

All the best,

Luke Chung
President

Contents

• Join Luke Chung at the New York Access User Group on September 10th
• Total Access Emailer Update for Access 2010 and 2007
• Fixing the Microsoft Windows Common Control Library (MSCOMCTL.OCX) Security Update
• Microsoft Access Tip for Error 3045: Could Not Use Database; File Already in Use
• Visual Studio and LightSwitch Custom Application Development Services

Join Luke Chung at the New York Access User Group on September 10th

FMS president Luke Chung is the featured speaker at the New York City Microsoft Access User Group meeting on September 10th, 6:30PM.

Luke will be discussing FMS products, future directions of Microsoft Access, the cloud, and answer questions about the industry and his experiences.

The meeting is free and held at the Microsoft offices at 1290 6th Ave., between 51st and 52nd Streets.

Total Access Emailer Update for Access 2010 and 2007

Total Access Emailer is the most popular Microsoft Access product for sending personalized emails. Easily use your data and reports to create custom email with attachments to communicate with your contacts. Total Access Emailer runs as a Microsoft Access add-in that requires no programming. The Professional version includes a VBA interface to let you automate email blasts programmatically. It also includes a royalty-free runtime library to let you distribute it within your applications to non-Total Access Emailer owners.

We are pleased to release an update to our product for Microsoft Access 2010 and 2007 users. An update for the 2003 version is coming soon. Information on the latest versions are available on the Total Access Emailer Updates page.

What's New

• Option to enable or disable International Encoding of email messages to support international (extended) character sets
• Setup program that support machine vs. user installations
• Improved support for Total Access Emailer tables stored in SQL Server databases
• Improved error handling for issues with ADP databases
• Improved handling of lists of emails or files separated by commas, semicolons, or combinations of both
• Improved selection of multiple files on disk to attach to an email

For more information, visit the updates page for Microsoft Access 2010 or Microsoft Access 2007. The Microsoft Access 2007 update is available for owners of version 12.6.

Thank you for your support in making Total Access Emailer such a great success!

Fixing the Microsoft Windows Common Control Library (MSCOMCTL.OCX) Security Update

On August 14, 2012, Microsoft released a security update for Microsoft Office that includes an update to the Windows Common Control MSCOMCTL.OCX. Unfortunately, this update causes problems with existing Microsoft Access, Visual Basic 6, and other applications that use common controls such as the Treeview and ListBox controls.

For us, this impacts our Total Access Analyzer program which uses the Treeview control in its database explorer feature.

It took us a while to figure out what was going wrong and why instances that were working for over a decade all of a sudden failed. After a lot of research, we discovered the culprit and came up with a reliable solution to address it.

Microsoft provides a workaround for this problem in a Knowledgebase article, but it doesn't always work. Our solution addresses this problem reliably. Read our article Fixing the Microsoft Windows Common Control Library (MSCOMCTL.OCX) Security Update for more details.

Microsoft Access Tip for Error 3045: Could Not Use Database; File Already in Use

You may encounter this error when you try to open a database, and someone else has the database opened in exclusive mode. However, when you examine how the other user has opened the database, you confirm they aren't opening it exclusively. What's going on?

Turns out, it can be related to two instances of Microsoft Access (or DAO) using different workgroup security files. Read more about the cause and solution in our blog: Microsoft Access Tip for Error 3045: Could Not Use Database; File Already in Use

Please also visit our Microsoft Access Error Number and Error Description Reference site for a complete list of Microsoft Access error numbers, many with links to resources explaining and resolving them.

Visual Studio .NET and LightSwitch Custom Application Development Services

Visual Studio LightSwitch is a wonderful addition to the Visual Studio family. This platform makes it far more efficient to create basic database applications with Microsoft SQL Server for the web.

Because of its reliance on Silverlight (it needs to be installed on each user's machine kind of like Adobe Flash), it's not really appropriate for general public web sites. But for internal applications where you can require your users to install this, it works wonderfully. There are some limitations on what you can build, but the efficiency of creating data display and data entry web pages with LightSwitch is far more efficient than traditional Visual Studio pages. It still lets you use C# and/or VB.NET to extend the functionality, but a lot of the complexity is gone.

The next version of LightSwitch with Visual Studio 2012 includes support for HTML5 which eliminates the need for users to install Silverlight. A preview version of it is available now from Microsoft.

Our Professional Solutions Group has created several custom LightSwitch applications recently to the delight of our clients. Learn more and contact us to learn how our team can help you.

Thank you for your continued support!

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