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

Charlotte Foust cfoust at infostatsystems.com
Tue Sep 27 10:09:05 CDT 2005


For my money, .Net is great!  Once you get your head around not only
n-tier design, but classes for *everything*, it simply isn't that
difficult.  Perhaps the hardest part is figuring out which to choose
from among the many option available when you want to do a particular
thing.  Typed datasets are far handier than either linked or local
tables, and I'm not paranoid about my code being stolen because anything
I invent can be thought of by someone else just as readily.

Charlotte Foust


-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Dettman [mailto:jimdettman at earthlink.net] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 7:28 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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