Obsession with MS Access

Post Reply New Topic

Wow, do I sound caustic!

I don't mean to sound this angry, but it just comes out that way. What I really mean to say is that IT is not the panacea for aspies like it was 10+ years ago. However, it's still likely the best place for people like us, overall.
And I do hope that you can find something that will work out for you. Still the best strategy to have is to ensure that you are more than prepared for anything, so by all means, become a master of Access and use that for all it's worth.

I know what you mean, when they interview now they try to weed out candidates who are too technical (which is a joke seeing as its a technical job). Its because business managers are too insecure with proper tech heads.

My career has suffered since all this happened. I worked as a business analyst for a couple of years but it was unsatisfying.

I was under the assumption that MS-Access (which i hate. i'm not a visual person) could be migrated to MSSQL Server for enterprise use. Of course, the last time I was forced to use Access was back in 1994, when my COTR (US government-speak for Contracting Office Technical Representative), assigned a project to me (a non-programmer) to covert a database that resided on a VAX 6000 series mini to MS-Access. I'm a librarian, not a programmer. I ended up learning MS-Access by the seat of my pants. It took until the naval base i was working at closed own to get the strcture defined in Access and to dump the data from the VAX into a useable format. Any wonder i don't like Access?

As a database administrator and developer, we use SQL Server for most of our database needs, though there are a few Access databases around. Some just use Access as the front-end and store all the tables, etc. on the SQL Server for the increased security and reliability, while others simply live on a network drive and everyone connects to the single mdb file.
Unfortunately, many of them have been designed by people who should not be designing databases, and there are even a few Access databases used to drive web pages (guess what happens when the mdb gets corrupted by a user)

Access is good to putting together something simple and can be quite powerful if you know what you're doing, but once you get into complex multi-user environments, things can get ugly. MS does make a free version of SQL Server (SQL Server Express), and provides tools to upscale from Access while retaining the front-end.

MS Access front end projects with a SQL Express back end database work rather well. It allows you to get over the severe limitations of MS Access itself. You can create views, stored procedures, user defined functions, user defined types, etc on the SQL server and MS Access can use them fine. In fact, you can use all of them to create some rather intricate views and still use MS Access's reporting feature as if they were plain tables in MS Access. The downside is that you're still using MS Access's reporting engine.

I have done myselft a nice set of forms for my DB now and have moved on to vb.net. I am linking to my access DB and trying to reproduce a front end for it. Doing VB means I have to add more code but I love coding.

Anyone do vb.net?

No, if you must use a .net language, that's probably the worst choice. The syntax comes from BASIC.

TTM, my friend. TTM.

I'm not usually a "government can't do anything right" heckler, because government can do certain things right, but this wasn't one of them Assigning a non-programmer to a programming task. Wow.

Trailing twelve months?

Time-to-market. Often, you just need something, anything, to get the job done. Finesse can be an expensive taste.

Sure, so if the only dude you have around is the one who can only do VB.net, go to town on it.

I'm able to provide TTM and quality at the same time, but maybe I have superpowers and just don't know it. There's a flipside to this coin, 90% of the effort in software is maintenance and if you produce s**t, you just increased that 90% by a factor of 8 or so.

What do you suggest?

Probably C#, which is incidentally also the most commonly used one. Relative to C++, there are things I think are ridiculous about C#, but it's better than VB.

As C# and VB both compile using the same common runtime I see little to chose between them. Even the function calls are to the same code, the only difference is the syntax in how they are called C# vs VB. I've developed software in around 20 languages over the last 30 years. I currently use VB because it is convenient and fast to create applications. If the code is well written and appropriately commented / documented maintenance is a non-issue.

I started programming with classic VB when I was about 11 (this was the age of Windows 3.1, long before .NET came along). With VB.NET, VB was brought up to par with other languages in functionality, and I continued to use it for many years. More recently, I switched to using C# exclusively because it was what everyone else in the office used, and have not gone back. The only downside is when I go back to work on my old VB code - I have to fight the urge to insert curly braces and end every statement with a semicolon;