[AccessD] ADP vs Access mdb/SQL

F**K the NDA. You listers want an ostensible insider's take? Not that I'm
close to the bone, just that I have a beta and few high friends in low
places.

Martin: >> Products are developed by different teams and as I am finding out
internal communication between teams at MS is crap.

This was mandated by the Fed. Chinese walls and all. No communication among
teams = Equal Opportunity for 3Ps. Assuming that Bill and Steve ultimately
agree to play by the rules imposed by the Fed, however egregious they might
find it, this is the result. Team A rewrites product A2003 with no knowledge
of what Team B is adding to product B2003.

Even as an alleged leftist (by Hindman et. al., though I don't see it that
way, I prefer the term post-capitalist, or one-worlder), this one confuses
me. 

I want all software to work together, across platforms and languages etc. 

But is the price the virtual monopoly of one particular company that already
owns say 89.9% of the software market? 

On the other hand, does it make any sense that the Access team is excluded
from the SQL team's discussions? And even if that perverse interpretation
were accurate, would you or I actually kneel down and obey this asinine
conclusion? Outlook devs may never know what the Access devs are thinking,
and vice-versa. Call me a criminal: I would say FU2 and hold secret meets in
Starbucks, passing infa-red notes that explain secret shortcuts,
undocumented and officially at least, not guaranteed to work. Beta code, so
to speak.

I am so disappointed by my tea-leaves reading that I am preparing to bail
from Access. I didn't want to do this. For several years I have championed
Access over alternative IDEs, and as any sort-list by my name will
illustrate. I would do most anything to help persuade MS to reconsider this
plan, but it's a fait-accompli I'm afraid. 

I was one of pioneers of ADP. MS hooked me instantly. Access suddenly became
100 times better than Enterprise Manager. I devoted thousands of hours to
ADP, I fought in the trenches and discovered this problem and that problem
and found work-arounds and published a few of them and offered a few more
here for free, and now MS cuts the legs from under not only me but everyone
else who has invested hours in ADP. 

You have no idea how sick this makes me feel. I have told some close friends
who owned the companies I have worked for recently, to bet everything on the
ADP/SQL technology. And now I have to tell them that maybe I can
reverse-engineer it back to ODBC and somewhow save the day, for less dollars
than it will actually cost because I'm so embarrassed that I recommended we
trust Microsoft.

I don't know what to do now. I think that every moment that I invest from
here on in is a moment I should have spent learning more about .Net or Java.
I am staying on this list because this is my home, and you are my family.
But I am sick to my stomach. 

Here's the Access 11 I would have designed, imagining for a moment that I'm
capable of holding such a job :-)

1. Lose DAPs. Replace this crap with wizards inherited from FrontPage, say,
so they can generate pages that require nothing more than a browser, and on
the server end nothing more than a successful connection object.

2. Supply a wizard that can inhale an Access app and from it create a
corresponding .net webForms app. When it sees a form + n subForms object, it
automatically creates either a dotnet subform or a linked page, you choose,
globally and individually.

3. Somehow find a way to support the new stuff coming in the next SQL. Write
all the IDE stuff as .Net forms etc. so they can be melded into any product.

Another beta user on this list and I exchanged some private mail on A11, and
found we were both on the same page. There isn't a book here, at the most a
couple of chapters. In the O11 rewrite, Access got the backhand compliment.
Three new features, wowee! So why the slap in the face? 

Eat the black tuplip because you own the other one, thereby trebling its
value. I.e. force all Access professionals into .Net, our collection of paid
courses, certs &c., all of which gen vastly mas dinero than the essentially
freebie Access. "Josephine in Hoboken buys one copy of Office Developer...
For how much? And can deploy anything she writes anywhere? Say again? Are
you some kind of socialist? We gotta nail this chick for a LOT more than
than that, FOOL!"

IOW, MS is preparing to take our legs out from under us. From now on, each
successive version will have relatively less capabilites, not more (i.e. as
more of the world's platforms move to .net or java, Access will be orphaned,
less and less able to communicate with this world -- of course it will still
be able to talk to Word and Excel, but those targets will grow increasingly
insignificant). 

That's my reading of the tealeaves, and f**k the NDA. I am angry.

"Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither." 
-- Benjamin Franklin 

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of
Mwp.Reid at Queens-Belfast.AC.UK
Sent: April 2, 2003 2:51 PM
To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com
Subject: [AccessD] ADP vs Access mdb/SQL


All I am saying on this

ADPS will remain a viable MS technology. How they interact with the server 
will changes. There are certain things you can do now that you will be
unable 
to do with future releases of SQL Server. This is an SQL Server problem not
an 
Access one. Products are developed by different teams and as I am finding
out 
internal communication between teams at MS is crap.

I was told and I quote 

"Bill Gates is very interested in Access as a power user tool" 

when I expressed my concerns over Access 11 offering little in the way of 
improvements for developers. 

The real thing that concerns me is the use of the term "Power USer" If MS
dont 
take it serious as a developers tool then we will not see big changes. AS
Susan says MS Office and ACcess is a major cash cow for Microsoft. No 
mission of it going. Lot of attention to ALpha 5 and they did give me a copy

and as I said I was not impressed.

One final thing. Some of us are privy to internal discussions at MS at
times. 
Until they appear on paper thats all they are discussions. 

Martin





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