The Future of Microsoft Access
The most difficult session I had to do at TechED in Barcelona was DAT231: Migrating Your Mission Critical Access Applications to SQL Server. The reason why it was hard was I had to convince a roomful of Access developers about the merits of upsizing to SQL Server and that since the two products architectures are so different, upsizing your application is actually going to be a rewrite in .NET (Windows or ASP .NET) or COM/ASP. The crowd did not boo me off the stage and I actually got pretty good scores and comments-it was a very highly ranked session on the Data Management Track. With some distance in Paris and time to reflect on long plane journeys, I started to think about the future of Microsoft Access.
It use to be that an Access developer can make the jump from Access VBA development to VB/COM development with not that much effort. That migration path does not exist anymore. Access and VB/COM had lots of things in common, including the language VBA (yes VB 6 developers, VBA is the language behind the Product you know as Visual Basic 6.0.) But .NET is just way too different.
Not sure what has to happen, maybe an Access .NET?? Who knows.
6:04:47 PM 
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