How to convert Access VBA to Visual Studio?

[MrDeej]

Hello my good people!

We have developed an application on the Access plattform for the last 3 years. Now we see that it has grown to a size where we would like to convert to standalone program because of Access licensing demand. I have been in contact with MS about Visual Studio and gotten a price for 300€ pr license of VS.

I also had some technical questions about VS, but there MS have a technical customer support which are to expensive to have some presale question.

We have used a VS 2008 ( i think) for some pre-testing of code and found that our way of coding the Access application, with VBA and ADODB connections works nearly the same way in VS. But some question still are floating.

In VS 2010
* Is there a report generating tool, like in Access? We have alot of standard reports and pivot chart which we are hoping is just as easy to create in VS as in Access

* We also use a SQL 2005 server for the data, is there any challenges, besides writing code for connection, on our VS created program to this sever?

Anything else we as VS-Noobs and Access-experts should know about before jumping into the fire and buy license for VS?

[David Gluth]

You have set yourself a large and fun task. I have participated in a conversion like this once.

First convert your access program to use the SQL database. This will be the easiest task as most all of your queries will work and all you have to do is change your connection strings.

VB includes a version of Crystal reports. It is a good report writing tool, though not the same as access. When I did this project I purchased a conversion tool. It read my access program, extracting and building all of my reports as crystal reports .RPT files. I was then able to add these to my VB project, edit them to use my SQL and it worked very nicely. Unfortunately that was many (7-8) years ago and I don't remember the name of the tool, but here is one you can look at http://www.microtools.us/accesstocr.aspx.

Then come the fun part. Open your VB project and start coding forms. Your designer will be similar, Most of your VBA code will work, your SQL syntax will have some minor changes. You will have a lot of fun.

Let us know how the project goes.

Dave

[groover]

This is not a simple task at all. The architecture of Access and .NET are very different. Microsoft dont provide any method for making this transition, but there are 3rd party tools that can help. one tool that is good for converting the forms and code is called Evolution. I think it converts vba code.
take a look at http://www.redbrooktech.com/AccessConverter.html