My own experience with Bedlam DL3....

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/03/17 00:00 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/03/16/553441.aspx

Not about Bedlam DL3 itself (I was on one of the other experimental DLs and apparently the one I was on had none of those people who would send "me too" mails!).

It was actually a fellow developer over in Access who was fascinated about the new Jet MAPI IISAM that I was writing a wizard for, and the possible queries he could run.

You see, he had already hypothesized about using a linked table pointing at the Global Address Book inside of Microsoft to try determine other patterns, such as trying to identify a correlation between job title and vegetarian meals being ordered at events.

And he was blocked of course by not really having access to the information about who had ordered particular meals. How depressing....

But by being one of the people on Bedlam DL3, and apparently one of the first 8000 members, he had all the "me too" posts sitting in his inbox, and he was really interested in trying to look at the job titles of those who actually posted "me too" in order to look for correlations.

(I suggested this seemed a tad excessive, if not obsessive, but to the man who counted ceiling tiles to try to determine senority and was frustrated by the diasgonal offices in Building 1 that stymied the counts, to the man actually had in the past looked back to the Access 1.1 SLM logs three versions later to track down who had caused a particular bug, such a suggestion did not really have much influence!)

I never did find out if he created the program he was going to use to do his little cross-disciplinary study, but I think about the way he would passionately describe the plan any time someone brings up Bedlam DL3, and smile.... :-)

I can relate a little bit to this guy. Learning Access can feel like learning Jedi powers. At first it's a little mysterious. Unlike all the other Office applications, Access doesn't present any obvious starting point.

So you have to investigate and learning something about how relational databases work and what tables are about and how queries, forms, and all the rest work together. Then you start to realize that you can build applications(!), and you start to look at the kind of stuff you can do, and where you can pull data from, and suddenly you find yourself wanting to query anything you can get your hands on.

Anyway, it's cool to hear that there was someone who felt like that on the Access team.

Thanks guys.

Counting the ceiling tiles is not reserved to a mere one or two - I worked with a number of people at Microsoft that were seriously upset when the number of ceiling tiles in their office was smaller than in someone else's.

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