jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Sat Jan 1 13:03:01 CST 2011
Mark, .Net programming is no panacea, however it is way powerful. Because it is way powerful it has a long learning curve, which is also steep in the beginning. I am extremely fast in Access, both in interface design as well as in coding. But the reason is that I have been doing it so long. All of the tricks that I know that make me fast in Access took a long time to learn. Access is not a trivial application or development environment. It is simply a fact that it will take you years to get as fast at .Net development as you are at Access development, however it is also fact that it took you years to get as fast at Access development as you are. I went to the community college and took two semesters of C#. I did so to give me a reason to keep at it until I got over the initial learning curve. I am not 15 months into real C# development and I am only now fully comfortable with the environment but still have many things to learn yet. Having the time I now do in .net I would say I am 25% of the way to being a master, but still many years from being a guru. I love .net. I love the C# language. I came from the VB language and made a conscious decision to switch. I love what the .net framework gives me out of the box. That said, when I had to whip out a fully functional (but simple) database I punted and used Access, simply because I had to whip it out in two weeks. In 10 or 20 hours I can build the entire thing in Access which I still cannot do in .Net. But I do expect to get there in .Net and I expect to do so in the next year. And once I do get there, the built in power of .Net will make my applications inherently more powerful and flexible. All I can say is if you are a programmer as well as a database developer, start learning .Net. It will pay in the long haul and you will enjoy the programming environment in a way that you cannot in Access / vba. As a programmer it is fun (to me) to learn things like raising and sinking events, threading, interfacing to SQL Server, and all of the things that .Net just hands to you (but you have to learn) to use in your applications that VBA doesn't have and can never have. I consider myself to be at the end of the VBA / DAO path, there is not much left that I do not know. .Net is a powerful new world. John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com On 1/1/2011 10:47 AM, Mark Simms wrote: > I'll definitely check it out because I've always been wondering what the > productivity delta is between dot-net programming and Access programming. > That being said, you are in a completely different world Shamil.... > I try to stay on top of things, but I'm clueless with regards to buzzwords: > EDM > RDLC > Linq > > So another issue is: when you must get dragged into all of this really > esoteric technology, do you lose sight or lose focus of the business > functionality of the application ? >> >> New Year Eve is approaching here, and I wanted to send you some gifts >> from >> Ded Moroz - here they are: >> >> This is a set of projects I have got developed a few days ago during >> 40+ >> hours R&D coding marathon. >> The task was to finish all the work in about 40 hours. >> So a few bugs left in there as release deadline wasn't possible to >> move. >> They (the bugs) are described in readme. >> But in general all the sample apps work rather well as my tests here >> show. > >