ISVs, Access, and VS 2005

Speaking of  ISVs and VS 2005...

One of my current areas of expertise and interest in migrating VB6 developers and projects to .NET.  Over the past 2 years  I have had the opportunity to have many formal and informal discussions and consulting engagements on this topic, including my VB Upgrade Tour through Europe.  More recently, I find myself having alot of conversations with ISVs on (finally) moving their applications to .NET.   More significantly, I find that alot of these ISVs have applications developed with Access (or something similar such as Magic or Powerbuilder).

These conversations generally go pretty well - until we start talking about what it takes to get a fully functional "bread and butter" data access & data entry form in VB (or C#).  That's when I start offering to buy them beers...  I have never developed applications with Access, but have definitely come to appreciate how easy it is to develop straight forward forms with Access.   And if that is really all your app needs, then it is a good solution for you.  Of course, I don't think that going forward, Access is really flexible enough to really meet all customer needs and also add real value - simple desktop (or even C/S) apps that just talk to a single data source are becoming less and less common.

Microsoft has really come a long way in closing the gap in functionality/productivity for building "standard" data-bound forms.  VS 2005 has become much more Access-like in terms of how you define your data sources, how you define and execute commands against those data sources, and offering a fast but flexible tool for autonmatically generating functional data forms that are also customizable if required.

In my opinion, the four most significant and compelling issues in this area are:

(1) The improved experience and productivity of designing/building data-centric WinForms
(2) The improvement in easily building forms that use automatic data binding and actually work correctly
(3) The integration of SQL Server Reports
(4) The improvements in the typed DataSet and the introduction of the TableAdapter

 Of course, it goes without saying (but I'll say it anyway), that I am talking about Access as an app builder.  In terms of the database itself, you need to be using SQL Server or  MSDE / SQL Express for any significant application.

Are you an ISV or Access developer who has already moved to .NET or is currently considering it ?  What are your thoughts and issues?  Have you checked out  VS 2005 yet ?

 

3 Comments

  • Alex,



    It sounds like you are making the right choices - using SQL Server and migrating (only) when it makes sense.



    Reporting - there is no doubt the that Access report designer is great and is always the tool to beat. Wait until the next Beta of SQL RS 2005 is out and take a look at it again.



    Connected ADO.NET - I hear what you are saying. You are right that it is not there, but that it is not really a big deal to write to code to force updates immediately when you need it. The DataSet offers other programmatic features that, for me at least, make the tradeoff well worth while. I have passed on the request for a connected model more than once to the dev teams in the past few years.

  • Alex,



    As to your feature requests in your second post, I'll leave that for the MS guys to address - I know they are watching these comments. Thanks.

  • Jackie,



    Do you know if the next Beta of SQL RS 2005 will work with SQL Server Express? Whilst, I’m using the full version of SQL Server, I’m sure there are a lot of people using MSDE or Jet that are thinking of using SQL Server Express, but would like a good reporting deigner.

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