Think about like this:
The glory days of Access were during the 16 bit era. Access was the
first Integrated Database Development Environment on the market designed
for win3.11 -- it was unbeatable and it was also an RDBMS. With the
arrival of 32 bit systems Access was getting left in the dust by Server
DBs like Oracle. Sql Server 2000 was the first Server DB that Microsoft
came up with which was competitive. Then they came up with the ADP for
interfacing with this server DB, but as you know, the ADP had more
issues than it was solving. So MS came up with .Net. And you are
correct - that .Net is not the fixall. But with Sql Server 2005/VS2005
- MS is basically modeling its technology after Access (again) in that
this is their first full OOP integrated development environment effort.
I believe Sql Server 2008 with VS2008 fixes some issues that have arisen
with the OOP integrated development environment effort. This is
supposed to give the ease of programming/database programming the same
as Access except for OOP and a server DB instead of a File based DB.
Having been using .Net for over 6 years now, I find it much easier to do
stuff because I have way more functionality, and also the .Net framework
has encapsulated alot of the API's into managed code, thus alleviating a
bunch of spaghetti code.
I still use Access because a lot of the people who I support started out
their systems with Access but have stepped up to the Server environment,
and MS has obviously been focusing their Server/Enterprise efforts on
the OOP environment. It is all about adapting.
I have read that Microsoft is outselling Oracle with their new OOP
paradigm which is modeled after the Access paradigm - the Integrated
development environment. I tried out Java for a year or two around
2002-2003, but .Net can do everything Java can do just so much easier.
I keep reading posts of people who are trying to perform Enterprise
operations with Access and encountering all sort of problems. That is
because Enterprise in the 16 bit system of the early 1990's is way
different than Enterprise in 2008 for 32 bit systems.
Access is still a great tool, just not the tool of choice for enterprise
ops (server based ops).
Rich
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