Cost basis in foreign investments

One of perhaps the more annoying issues with Microsoft Money, is when you have investments in a currency which isn't the base currency in the file.

The article: Cost basis in foreign investments, explains an issue where the price will change on a daily basis, because it is recalculated based on the prevailing exchange rate.

IMHO, this could be greatly reduced by remembering the exchange rate at the time of the 'buy' investment transaction, but it's probably a bigger problem than that, as one would need to remember all investment transaction exchange rates, and then do some humongous calculations to get the correct figure out.

However, might be one for lobbying to Microsoft.

Stopping the MoneySide (Money Viewer) opening automatically

Stopping the MoneySide (Money Viewer) opening automatically.

MoneySide (or the Money Viewer) has been removed from Microsoft Money, but for those people still using it, this article says how to stop it opening automatically when using Internet Explorer.

Security in Microsoft Money

New article - Security in Microsoft Money.

Security is important in Microsoft Money, but is only as good as the weakest link in the chain.

Microsoft are very secretive on their security policies, so it is difficult to ascertain too many details. They do take it seriously though, and use various mechanisms to protect the data that is held on MSN Money servers, as well as to secure your own file.

Some of the security information that I have managed to find is on the article.

Generating 'FAQ Article xxx' links

In the website, i often refer to or cross-reference FAQ Articles. In general, they are linked as "FAQ Article XXX" which will open the link in the browser when clicked.

To ease development and page generation, I use a shortcut to generate these links - I code the FAQ Article number between square brackets [[ ]], which then generates a hyperlink and also adds a tooltip on the link with the title of the article.

ie, [[340]] turns into: FAQ Article 340.

To do this, I use Response.Filter in the Global.asax to utilise some code I found at http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/WhitespaceFilter.asp

Global.asax:

Sub Application_BeginRequest(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)
 If Not Request.Url.PathAndQuery.ToLower.IndexOf(".aspx") = -1 Then
  Response.Filter = New MyHttpFilter(Response.Filter)
 End If
End Sub

The filter itself is as above from the codeproject site. I change the 'Write' function though with my own customization.

Public Overrides Sub Write(ByVal MyBuffer() As Byte, _
     ByVal offset As Integer, ByVal count As Integer)
 Dim data(count) As Byte
 Buffer.BlockCopy(MyBuffer, offset, data, 0, count)
 Dim s As String = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(data)
 Dim myDelegate As New MatchEvaluator(AddressOf MatchHandler)
 Dim pattern As String = "\[\[(\d{2,})\]\]"
 Dim re As New Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.Multiline _
          Or RegexOptions.IgnoreCase)
 s = re.Replace(s, myDelegate)
 ' Finally, we spit out what we have done.
 Dim outdata() As Byte = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(s)
 _sink.Write(outdata, 0, outdata.GetLength(0))
End Sub 'Write

Private Function MatchHandler(ByVal m As Match) As String
 Dim mFaqId As String
 Dim faqTitle As String = ""
        Dim returnString as string = "<a "
 mFaqId = m.Groups(1).Value
 Try
  Dim c As New cacheClass
  Dim dv As DataView
  dv = c.getfaqList()
  dv.RowFilter = "id = '" & mFaqId & "'"
  faqTitle = CStr(dv.Item(0).Item("title")).Replace(Chr(34), "''")
 Catch ex As Exception
 End Try
        returnString += "title=" & Chr(34) & faqTitle & Chr(34)
        returnString += " href=" & Chr(34) & "/faq/article/" & _
              mFaqId & ".aspx" & Chr(34) & " >"
        returnString += "FAQ Article " & mFaqId & "</a>"
 Return returnString
End Function

Note how it uses the regular expression to find a match and make the change.

The whole aim is to reduce the time I spend on the site - it does that nicely!