Jim Dettman
jimdettman at verizon.net
Mon Oct 26 15:47:40 CDT 2009
Tony, <<If you can produce a sound stable application, it really does not matter what platform you develop it in. >> That's true, but what also works into that is the type of application that you need to develop. It's not the demise of Access; Access will be a round a good long time I'm sure. What may die off is VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). The problem with that is that you as a developer are limited in what you can do with Access *if* that were to come about. Certainly you still would be able to turn out apps with Access if that indeed did happen. But things like calling the windows API, using collections, etc would get thrown out the window. That's not to say that macro's won't be enhanced further as we have already seen (error handling and an editor was added), but using macro's alone would severely restrict the types of apps that you could produce. It may be that both will exist for a long time to come, but my objection is that as a true development tool, little improvement is being made and we are going backwards in several ways. For example, how many releases has it been now that: 1. Access can't easily use all 3rd party controls because it never fully implemented the iDispatch interface (version 2.0) 2. VBA has problems with breakpoints - i.e. code will stop where you had a breakpoint and then removed it (Access 95) 3. The VBA compiled project gets corrupt - /decompile is needed to bail you out (Access 95) 4. References break easily (Access 95) And the list goes on. These are all things that should have been fixed long ago or improved, yet here we are in 2008 and instead of those fixes, we get more end user functionality. That's why it's hard to stay positive about Access from a development standpoint. Jim -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Tony Septav Sent: Monday, October 26, 2009 3:39 PM To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: [AccessD] Access2007 Question Hey All You guys/gals are scaring me again. I don't understand this continuous discussion of the demise of Access. If you can produce a sound stable application, it really does not matter what platform you develop it in. The client is the final determining factor, if they are happy then you are happy. I still have a couple of applications out there running under Access97, they work and the client is happy. I updated to Access 2003 on the advise from this list, and avoided Access2007. And interesting enough, in the last couple of weeks I have been bashed by the Oracle developers who have said again "Oh you are using that toy, Access". My come back was " Okay give me a project and let us take the gloves off and see who produces the best project", no takers. On the other end "Yes I may be falling behind", but it is only marketing that is dictating what is the new flavour of the week. If you do your job and you do it well, who cares what marketing tells you. Everyday I see so much extraordinary work done by the individuals on this list and I am constatntly amazed. Why is everyone so willing to throw in the towel. -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com