800-653-8428
About

A Letter From the President

March, 2010

To borrow a common platitude, March is definitely coming 'in like a lion'. In Florida, this is our brief spring before the onslaught of summer heat and hurricanes.  While most of the rest of the country is still under snow or gray skies, we're already roaring ahead. And for once, we can say the same thing about our development efforts!

In fact,  when I announced IPM Classic last month, I'd set a target date for May for a Beta, with an end of summer release.  To our glee, we may be able to beat that projection by over a month!  Later this month we'll be adding IPM Classic pages to our website, so watch for that. A downloadable beta will follow thereafter.  We'll also be preparing another newsletter when we have the date for an introductory IPM Classic Webinar.

Meanwhile, we have achieved some milestones with IPM 10 that are equally pleasing.  We knew it would start to "settle down" this quarter, and we're pleased to have many, many more enhancement requests than bug reports.  And we've just done a significant performance enhancement that improves speed by 21 times in some functions! Now THAT's optimization! Now my goal is to percolate that technology throughout the application. That's the kind of change we know will expand IPM 10's usefulness to larger operations, too.

So while for us the month did come in like a Lion,  it won't be leaving like a Lamb. We expect to end March like ae a pride of lions!

Yours,

William J Bennett
President

Previous Letter

Technical Sidebar about the Impossible

In 1996, programmers groaned and rent their clothes about switching from 16-bit VB3 to 32-bit VB4.  Some 'experts' claimed it couldn't be done, and that all older software had to be re-written from the ground up, and many were.

Then, in 2002, the entire argument started again.  Now it was switching from VB6 to Dot Net.  It's impossible! Throw out millions of lines of code! Start over! To this day, there are still luddite programmers storming Redmond for continuing support for VB6.

Objectively, we all know how accurate most pundits are. Sure, recoding every control and every form in a project is a BIG job. But it's possible, it's tedious. Wading though the terminological alphabet soup of Dot Net makes the most experienced VB6 programmer feel inadequate and ignorant. But both can be accomplished, they just require hard work!

Bottom line:  VB3 can be converted to VB4 32-bit, and Dot Net IS better than VB6.  And paradigm shifts suck. Deal with it, or go back to making wagon wheels!