I Knew He Was A Drunk When I Married Him...

I make a living writing database applications using Microsoft Access. I'd rather be programming with .net but we don't always get to go exactly where we want on our career path.

I use Access 2003. Some say it's the most reliable version of Access; some say it's the most unreliable. I think that is unreliable while you are designing an application, but is thankfully much more reliable in running your application in production. I can live with that.

Recently I was making many changes to a complex data editing form. At least 10 times in an 8-hour day I got the "Microsoft is sorry" error message that lets you know that it's too bad you didn't save your work. If you work quickly, you can often remember all the changes you made between crashes and archive a copy before the next crash. It's a pain but I'm used to it.

I used to feel sorry for myself having to use a program that I'd be embarrassed to say I wrote. But then I think, "Hey! I know enough work-arounds that I can succeed in building applications with this. It would be too hard for mere mortals. This gives me an advantage!"

Today I wasn't losing my work. But Access was acting up anyway. Sometimes in the VBE window, it goes brain-dead and you can't save your work -- at least not from there. Today it refused to close down a help pane (pain) when I was finished. Thank goodness for the Windows Task Manager.

When the ugly head of "Microsoft is Sorry" appears, the message window looks very business-like. As though it's there to help. It offers to send data back to the mother ship so it can be ignored and offers to repair your database (which isn't really broken). Often, when you let it repair, it gets confused and you can end up losing everything. As far as using the information that is sent to them, don't get your hopes up. I understand that some 10-year-old Access problems still exist. There is not time to fix practical things when you are more interested in marketing "gee whiz" features rather than fixing basic problems.

Sometimes I feel as though Microsoft hates developers using its products.