[AccessD] report on Access Devcon Las Vegas

I thought I would report to the group some of my impressions on the future
of Access as presented at the "Advisor Summit" in Vegas this past week.
First, I am very encouraged by the fact Microsoft appears to be pouring
substantial resources into Access so the rumors of Access's demise are
greatly exaggerated. Having said that, my strong impression is that they are
strengthening the product for power/personal users as opposed to developers.
For example, they emphasized several times the experience of first opening
Access will provide a much richer interface with a lot of sample databases
to entice the new user to take the plunge. They contrasted this with the
current environment which isn't exactly intuitive when  opened for the first
time. 

The item that drew the most groans of disbelief from developers was
Microsoft's promotion and re-emphasis on macros (of all things!). In fact,
the new sample databases will be written to use macros! While MS claims the
macros have been strengthened, the confusing old halt message dialogue
popped up when a macro they were running during the presentation ran into
trouble (sigh). Apparently the real issue is that macros can run safely in
sandbox mode whereas VBA will still be subject to the same old security
risks. Consequently new installs of Access will have VBA security set to
high similar (I think) to the security screen Excel currently shows.  While
I am hazy on all the particulars and the exact ramifications of this, I
have little doubt this will make developer's lives more complicated. This
strikes me as an exercise in CYA for MS. 

I specifically asked if VBA was dead and the answer was definitely not, in
fact (according to the MS guys) the object models were being improved,
enhanced, etc. although I can't recall any specifics. ADPs, however, appear
to have no future and  I was encouraged not to start any new projects using
them. Also interesting was the fact that the infamous Northwind is being
rewritten. Apparently the debate within Microsoft is how complicated the VBA
code should be since this is basically an example DB for newbies. My strong
opinion to them was that the code should be up to the highest standards.
This means using classes, function calls, error checking, naming
conventions, etc. IMHO when  newbies first venture into VBA they often take
Microsoft's examples as gospel. (I have to admit I did when I first started)
so Northwind should not be written by some summer intern. Especially since
users will be using macros much more, when they are ready to venture into
the world of VBA they should be exposed to the best coding practices.
Anyway, if you have a strong opinion about what Northwind should look like I
can give you the email of the program manager who is trying to figure out
what to do. 

Anyway, it was a worthwhile conference although the slots didn't cut me any
slack. Apparently the money you take to Vegas stays in Vegas.

Jim Hale

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