Microsoft Money 2007 workarounds

Upgraded to the Microsoft Money 2007 earlier this summer. As much as I like the new features, it seems to lockup fairly regularly, which makes it very slow to accomplish things

I've developed the following workarounds to help me at least survive, but I'm hoping Microsoft will eventually release a fix for these.

Lockup while matching bank-downloaded transactions to manually or automatically-entered transaction.

1. Select the Bank-downloaded transaction
2. Select 'Change'
3. Choose to 'Match' to an existing transaction.
4. Choose the matching transaction
5. Click Save
6. {Money will lockup here}
7. Close the application, then start it again

The Bank transaction is now matched to a manually entered one successfully.

Adding a check number to a transaction that was entered without one
(This occurs regularly for me when a bill is paid via my bank's online banking, but the payee has to receive a physical check, so the bank is assigning a check number, not myself)

1. Select the transaction
2. Enter the check number the bank used
3. Save
4. {Money will lockup here}
5. Close the application, then start it again

After restarting, the check number will be properly reflected

Balancing an Account

1. Click on 'Balance this account'
2. Enter the Statement date, and ending balance
3. {Money will lockup here}
4. Close the application, then start it again
5. Click on 'Balance this account'
6. Complete the reconciliation, as appropriate
7. Click 'Finish'
8. {Money will lockup here}
9. Close the application, then start it again
10. Reopen Money (All of the transaction you cleared will be marked as reconciled, but the 'balanced As Of Date' will not be updated, not sure that this is important, but it seems to throw off the date of future attempts to balance, so...)
11. Click on 'Balance this account' one more time
12. Enter the same Statement date from before, but use the ending balance as both the starting and ending balance
13. Click on Finish

Balance As Of Date will be updated.


I've contacted Microsoft's technical support about this issues, and they've pointed me the 'Repair' features, to no avail. Their next suggestions, unfortunately, are things such as 'delete all accounts' and recreate them, or 'delete all bills' and recreate them. Such steps seem to represent an huge amount of work without a lot of value added, when most people have limited time to manage their accounts and are looking to software to save them time.

Hope this may help someone running into the same issue.

Quotes on 'Change'

"When you CHANGE your THINKING, you CHANGE your BELIEFS.
When you CHANGE your BELIEFS, you CHANGE your EXPECTATIONS.
When you CHANGE your EXPECTATIONS, you CHANGE your ATTITUDE.
When you CHANGE your ATTITUDE, you CHANGE your BEHAVIOR.
When you CHANGE your BEHAVIOR, you CHANGE your PERFORMANCE.
When you CHANGE your PERFORMANCE, you CHANGE your LIFE."
- John Maxwell

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ASP.net DataGrid

Grew my brain a bit on the ASP.net datagrid this past weekend while working on the upcoming web site www.smartmoneycredit.org. It's very interesting how many things can be done declaratively, though still having to do some lifting in the code. It may be due to my limitations, or the fact that the site is still in .net 1.1.

Had to do through code:

• Assigning a CSS class based on the contents of a row, certain columns being present or empty
• Using a complex function to determine the text of a cell
• turning the visibility of a control on or off

For now, I'm living with it, there are just 1 or 2 pages that have some messy Item_DataBound event handlers. In the future, I might write something of a 'UI Helper' Layer that grabs business objects and applies some parsing and formatting to get the data into a UI friendly state. At least enough that a web page can handle it declaratively, and/or have better hints as to what styles to use.

Documentation I keep turning to are the articles on the 4 guys from rolla site (http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/040502-1.aspx)
by Scott Mitchell. I saw him present a few years ago in San Diego at the Beginner's .net user group. It was (appropriately) a very basic presentation. It wasn't until the past year or so that I discovered some of his information to be very in-depth and developed a better appreciation.

Mens Sana Foundation

Just completed some updates to move the Mens Sana Foundation's web site over to a new payment process for their e-commmerce site. The link is www.menssana.org/books

Open Source Hosting

Real World IS has open source and source code samples available at the following locations:

Planet Source Code

SourceForge.net

RealWorldIS.com

Just completed some updates to RealWorldIS.com. Basically refreshed it with some information that had been badly out of date since my move back to Sacramento, CA last year. And adding some links back and forth to the blog.

The site turned out be over-engineered in the past, was intended to have a database of projects, technologies, etc. which would then be exposed via the web. Just got unwieldy to keep up to date. The new scheme simplifies that, and will just have all of the content in the web pages vs. making it db-driven. Definitely a case of the cobbler's kids going barefoot, as the client web sites I've built over the past 2-3 years use much new tools, more standards compliant.

Future directions will be pulling it more towards being a showcase site for techniques I'm using on client web sites (some public, some intranet)
- Updating to .net (current in classic ASP)
- Scrapping frames
- Standards compliant (i.e. XHTML, CSS, etc.)
- Updating recent project descriptions

Unattended Install Scripts

Blog with a compendium of unattended (i.e. 'silent' installs for some common Windows utilities (i.e. Flash Player)...

http://www.stealthpuppy.com/blogs/travelling/archive/2007/01/23/shameless-self-promotion-unattended-install-scripts.aspx

Still testing how to get them to run under limited rights permissions, or be able to run remotely through WMI. Some solution where an admin would just be able to queue up the install or kick it off, without having to remote in.