[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