Life Beyond Fife

Engineering from the glorious Kingdom

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OLE Automation Date Converter
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OLE Automation Date Converter

Have you ever had problems with numbers somewhere around 40,000 claiming to be dates? It could well be that you need a tool to help you quickly convert dates from the OLE Automation Date - aka OADate - format into something a bit more human readable. If so you're in luck, simply go to the Life Beyond Fife GitHub repository to get hold of the sourcecode, or download the executable. Or read on if you want a bit more background. OLE Automation Dates, or more simply OA dates is a Microsoft standard for specifiying a date and time in a...

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Developing in the Brown Field
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Developing in the Brown Field

A friend and former colleague of mine told me after leaving the company we had both worked at, "I never want to work for a big company again." I couldn't understand the need for a blanket ban on all big companies from future employment opportunities. The reason apparently came down to the distinction between Greenfield and Brownfield development. In simple terms Greenfield development means writing software from scratch whereas Brownfield generally entails bugfixing or enhancements to existing code projects. Brownfield development is not specifically a bad thing or something to be avoided; there will be many impressive software projects that...

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