InfoPath, No Cure for Cancer. Well...

A lot of talk about InfoPath.  Just got my beast of an Office 2003 beta kit in the mail, so I've been playing around with it.  I wouldn't say I've drank the kool-aid, but I definitely have sipped it.  Not my favorite flavor, but I definitely see where others might enjoy it. 

The place I see it being used are the VB developers.  Now, don't get me wrong VB.NET is my .NET language of choice and I'm not making any excuses why.  I just like it better.  But I also know what's going on with the CLR and all that.  What I'm talking about are the VB developers who still think COM is where those old mice go, and still use DAO because it works for them.  You guys know who I'm talking about.  They really just want a simple interface to connect into whatever date source they might have.

Now, InfoPath has been getting a lot of hype for the point at an XSD file and away you go.  And some criticism for it too. Well, imagine that this company mearly needs to talk to another company that has exposed their XSD and you work for a company that needs to submit, say order requests to it.  The only thing you know about .NET is that you can jack up the prices on people when you knock over a bunch of wine bottles.  But you are a power user in Word / Access.  You fire up InfoPath, create the form for doing this and you are done.  Pretty simple.  Now, you DON'T need to connect to XSD.  That's why the hype is been about, but just playing around the only thing I had available to me where some CSV files and Northwind.mdb.  It connected to those just fine. 

I'm not quite sure honestly what *I* would use it for.  I would rather throw something together in ASP.NET personally.  But just because I'm not going to be use it doesn't mean it doesn't have a place.  Of course, everyone using it will need Office 2003 installed.  Just like Access.  I don't think Microsoft intended this application to be an Enterprise Development tool, just something between Excel and .NET.