A Field By Any Other Name is Just As Good

It's clear that Microsoft has truly renewed their commitment to our lovable little friend, MS Access. They have launched a series of Tutorials aimed at introducing MS Access to a generation that has little or no idea what Access is and how it works.

Outstanding.

The initial tutorial, however, set off a small controversy among some of my peers; some of us felt it was a bit lax in modeling good design practices. After a brief discussion, though, it became clear that the overall goal is more important than some minor points--points that can be debated anyway.

If it brings more developers to the table, and if they taste the flavor of our lovable little friend's power, and go on to adopt it as a tool in their own toolkits, that can only be seen as a Good Thing™.

So, despite my initial misgivings, I am sharing the link here. I hope you do as well. The more the merrier.

Proof of Life

The A-Team (i.e. the Access development team) at Microsoft have done something unprecedented, I believe.

They've started putting their plans for MS Access on the Office 365 Roadmap. You can read more about it all on Anders Ebro's Blog here: Smiley Coder's Review of the Office 365 Roadmap for ACCESS.

You can find the Roadmap itself here: Roadmap for Future Access Enhancements

Note that the two items mentioned here have been the subject of considerable discussion among the Microsoft Access MVP Group for a long time, and the fact that The A-Team is moving ahead on them sends a powerful message to the many fans of our lovable little database tool.


The inclusion of the BigInt data type increases the compatibility between Access and modern versions of SQL Server. That's a good thing from any perspective.
Restoring the ability to link Access to .dbf format files addresses a HUGE pain point for a couple of industries. Most of us probably shrugged our shoulders when it was deprecated in Access 2013, but to those people who NEED this ability, it was a deal-breaker.

I couldn't be more delighted to see a public announcement... Well, at least not in the arena of software development.

A Timely Reminder

Not an Access topic, but one I feel strongly about.

J Street Blog on Scam being circulated -- again