Jim Lawrence
accessd at shaw.ca
Tue Sep 27 15:27:13 CDT 2005
Hi John: Is it my imagination but are all the new sites starting to look the same??? Jim -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of John W. Colby Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 7:58 AM To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving' Subject: Re: [AccessD] The future of Access, .NET and SQL >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 -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com