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ou know what drives me nuts (among so many other things)? What's making me crazy this week is the requirement—in so many areas of programming—that you must serialize data into a file on disk before you can programmatically work with that data. Don't believe that this is an issue?

Here's a challenge for you: Store an image in a database somewhere. Now, using the language of your choice, write code that retrieves that image and creates a new picture box on a slide, in Microsoft PowerPoint, that contains that image. I tried. Perhaps I missed the point, but the only way I could accomplish this task was to store the image into a disk file, and then retrieve the image from the disk file and display it on the slide. Although this isn't a difficult task, the fact that I have to do it really irks me. Solving the problem this way is slow, totally unscalable, and as far as I can tell, the only way to solve the problem.