Good Stuff

Experiences that don't kill you make you stronger.

I am a professional database applications developer using Access 2003. I use it instead of any number of other development platforms for several reasons:

1. I belong to one of the finest user groups for developers: The Portland Access User Group (PAUG -- www.paug.com). This group consists not of magicians who show what they can do but won't reveal secrets. This is a group of professionals who have made discoveries and share them with their peers. We learn from each other!

2. Access 2003, not being the latest product, has a wealth of technical books available. They are used books, often in brand-new condition for a fraction of the original price. www.amazon.com

3. The Internet! Google for an error message or a technical topic, and you are sure to get some useful information. There is also Usenet (google groups). I find answers on the groups are often not well thought out. When somebody publishes a web page, they generally put a lot more thought into it than when they post an answer on a news group. That said, I have a Google watch for the phrase "Access has encountered a problem". If a question or comment is posted that has this phrase, I get an email and can go investigate. Seems like a great idea to me!

4. Desktop search! Today I was adding a "build shortcut" button to my Access Tools program. Hmmm... how do you build a shortcut (.lnk)? I remembered that I had played around with a vbscript program to do such a thing about 5 years ago. I fired up my X1 desktop search program, typed in "create shortcut" and found a version of this that I had converted to Visual Studio VB6. Splendid!

I have been driven to distraction by things in Microsoft Access 2003 that don't work right. This necessity was the mother of invention of my Access Tools program. It lets me compact and repair a selected file reliably (every single time), to replace the built-in command that fails much of the time. I read the application version number and date and have buttons to date stamp it with today's date and to increment the version number. It's very awkward to decompile the VBA in Access. So I have a button to do that.

So, right-click on an .mdb or .mde and select Tools and you can do things to the file easily that are difficult to do "The Microsoft Way".

Good stuff!