[AccessD] The future of Access, .NET and SQL

John W. Colby jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Tue Sep 27 09:57:32 CDT 2005


>Like it or not, .Net is here to stay it seems.

Yes, I have to agree.  And to be quite honest I like it - IF you have high
speed internet to assist in looking up stuff that isn't in the books.  .Net
is far and away the most powerful development framework I have ever seen.
With power comes... Confusion, steep learning curves, huge time commitments.


The nice part is that MS has poured so much time and energy into .net, and
indeed appears to be using it themselves in-house, that it appears unlikely
that it will ever just "go  away" as so many other MS "greatest thing since
sliced bread" projects have.

Just an aside, I brought up my new web site last week -
www.colbyconsulting.com.  It uses DotNetNuke (DNN) which is an entire
framework for building web sites.  DotNetNuke is an awesome tool, but it is
also an entire ASP.net application in it's own right.  If you register on my
site, you will have access to a Forums page (nothing in it yet of course).
The forums module is just a snap-in to DNN.  I went out and found it,
uploaded it, inserted a page and dropped the module on the page.  Voila,
forums in my site for whatever I think is useful to discuss.  

DNN is about separating appearance from content from process.  You can (once
you come up to speed, which in this case isn't THAT hard) just edit the
content that you see on a web page directly in a text editor, on-line in
your site.  You can add / delete pages, already (automatically) linked to
menu items, or submenu items.  Theoretically you can skin it (yea, my new
site is pretty ... Uhh... "Functional looking" so far).  Skins are not
content, are not process.  And of course, if you need process (a program)
you have .NET available at your fingertips.

I am looking at developing a set of custom modules for DNN for a web site I
am trying to get happening - www.StarfishKatrina.com .  I need a custom
program to allow congregations to volunteer to assist families needing
relocation assistance, and which allow aid organizations to find these
congregations.  The web site is just the middle man but I need a couple of
pages to allow these two entities to enter themselves into a database (SQL
Server is available to DNN modules, and perhaps MySQL as well).  Since DNN
is ASP.Net based, and has a well defined interface for building modules that
"snap-in" to DNN, I hope(!) that doing this will be on the trivial side.  

DNN already has code for building what they call CommonBusinessObjects
(CBOs) which are just the data classes for a table, and what they call a
"hydrator" that loads instances of ANY CBO from a matching table.  Pass in a
data reader and a class type and back comes an instance of that class type
containing all the data from a record in the table.  As long as your
properties match the field names, it just works.  

This kind of stuff makes the process of developing data driven applications
MUCH easier, and can exist exactly because of the power of .NET (ASP.Net in
this case) being leveraged by the DNN developers being leveraged by ME!

Yea, .Net is tough to get into but it is just so powerful, so much stuff
just ready to use, and so much else already available out there for a
download.

I am in no way "there" yet, or even close, but I am definitely on my way.

John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com 

Contribute your unused CPU cycles to a good cause:
http://folding.stanford.edu/

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Jim Dettman
Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 10:28 AM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: Re: [AccessD] The future of Access, .NET and SQL


Arthur,

<<Perhaps I am just depressed this evening :)>>

  No, I just think your being realistic.  .Net is here to say whether we
like it or not.  About four years ago I started looking for alternatives to
Access and settled on Visual Fox Pro despite the fact that it was
(supposedly) "on it's last legs", but it gave me some of what Access offered
(integrated DB engine) and yet got around some of the short comings (not
being able to produce EXE or do n-Tier designs).

  As a result, I ignored .Net.  I think I'm going to pay for that now.  I've
already lost one consulting job because I had no .Net experience and by the
time I do finally manage to get my arms around it, I'll probably have lost
quite a few more.

 Like it or not, .Net is here to stay it seems.

Jim.

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of Arthur Fuller
Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 2:05 AM
To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'
Subject: [AccessD] The future of Access, .NET and SQL


Frankly I would say that MS (the company) has never regarded Access as a
serious development tool... this despite the efforts of the Access
development team to make it one. The bottom line (of principal interest to
MS) is that Access ships with Office, and despite the developer's kits, they
always have and always will regard it as a toy, as compared (in various
eras) with VB, VC, .NET et. al. We are the underground. We like RAD
development and the Access development team keeps helping us do it. But it
is not in the commercial interests of MS either to provide a genuine
compiler or to provide a .NET porter. I deeply admire the Access development
team (knowing none of them personally). My take is that they fight an uphill
battle to keep this product in contention; but MS the corporation is much
more interested in the money it can make from .NET software, seminars, books
etc. This is not to slag .NET either. It is a high-quality product and it
can do things Access developers only dream of. But that is the dividing
line. There will never be an MS-authored Access compiler, nor a tool to port
Access apps to .NET. MS is in exactly the same position as Ashton-Tate was,
so long ago, when my friend Brian Russell had a vision that led to Clipper,
which revolutionized the dBASE marketplace back then. There seems to be no
one to step up to the plate and provide an Access-compiler nor an
Access->.NET converter, so here we are, not quite orphaned, and certainly
not abandoned by the Access dev team (mucho kudos to them), but we are not
in the MS mainstream. The greatest thing the Access dev team has achieved so
far, IMO, is the ADP project format, which can speak directly to SQL. I
don't know how long this will live. I hope for a long time. But I cannot
help but think that inside Microsoft, various powers think of this as
heresy, and tolerate it the same way they tolerate FoxPro. Funding will
continue, but minimally. (This is pure conjecture; I don't know a soul
within MS in any position of power or influence, so take my words as pure
conjecture from a recipient of their software and nothing more.) I am slowly
learning .NET. Only because the market seems certain to go that way. I would
much prefer to stay with Access, and receive a compiler that delivers EXEs
rather than the current run-time solutions, but I don't see that in the
cards, nor see a third party with the skills to bring it to the table. So
here I am, relatively expert at Access, an amateur at .NET, and thinking
more and more and more that I should just concentrate on my real expertise
and become a SQL Server DBA, and to hell with the application side of
things. Perhaps I am just depressed this evening :) Arthur

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