[AccessD] Burn-out

You remind me of a great T-shirt I saw in the old days of DOS:

"Real programmers don't use compilers; they write compilers."

I am therefore unqualified for the designation "Real Programmer", but I
love the slogan's message. It puts us all in our place.

One could go further: a good friend, Russell Freeland, once said, "I always
thought of C as a high-level front end to assembly language."

We all find our levels, then bitch and moan and whine about their
inadequate mechanisms of delivery. That's life in cyberspace. Get over it,
Please! It's never going to improve, for several reasons:

1.  The mission of the vendors is to deliver a new virgin once a year, if
not more frequently, the purpose of which marketing model is to guarantee
subscription-upgrades.

2. The mission of the intelligent users (possibly a contradiction in terms,
but let's grant the benefit of doubt) is to stick with what works, unless
and until it doesn't. They are fundamentally opposed to upgrading anything,
since this is dangerous water infested with human-eating sharks; and they
are quite right.

3. You and I, bold adventurers and beta-testers that we compulsively are,
The only safe defense against egregious anomalies is the use of VMs, so
nothing important is destroyed, no matter the extent of my stupidity,
drunken-ness, wars with spouse, impatient delays for the cheques to arrive,
and so on. One tries, despite these obstacles, to achieve Satori. It is not
easy, and it is doubly-tough for freelancers.

4. You and I and many other developers who consider ourselves Access
Developers and perhaps Office-Integration Developers (i.e. skilled at
combining the features of Word, Excel and Access into a cohesive
couple-of-clicks app that performs all its magic without intervention
beyond a single click on a button within the given Access app).

5. There is no obvious path to upgrading an Access app to a C# or
VB.NETetc. version. The models are way too different. Kudos to any
vendor willing
to supply such an add-in, but I give MS 0.4% odds of even wanting to
deliver this, let alone actually delivering a usable virgin. If you think
this is going to happen, I suggest therapy. There are only two chances of
this occurrence: a Slim One and a  Fat One.

6. Consider this from the viewpoint of the MS marketing department. Much
more money is to be gained by forcing developers into any combination of
Visual Studio, SSMS and so on. Tempt us with free and limited versions, and
hope that our clients will pick up the tab for an upgrade; or
alternatively, you have enough clients to justify your expenditure on the
Professional virgin, and from there you can Rock & Roll. Last time I
looked, that was about $700. Small potatoes in an SMB organization; big
potatoes for me.

7. I'm not really complaining about MS's strategy. All I am saying is that
in my current semi-retired state, I have not a lot of incentive to spend
the ~$700 to upgrade my tools. The few gigs per year that I get, one in
five wants Access 2010; most are mired in the XP versions of same, and
actually I consider this a Good Thing (as Martha Stewart might describe it).

8. Unlike many of the AccessD listers, I happen to love the new RibbonBar
layout and its customizability. I realize that my opinion is in the
minority; I can live with that.

A.

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is
by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We
cause accidents.

-Nathaniel Borenstein<http://www.quoteland.com/author/Nathaniel-Borenstein-Quotes/63/>