Re: adp vs mdb

"Robert Morley" <rmorley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:OaqW9kxmHHA.3520@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

Big deal. Are you so overly emotional that you can't read and
article and evaluate it on its factual content?

Actually, that's what I'm suggesting that people make sure they do
when reading one of Michael's articles. *Make sure* you evaluate
it's factual content, and don't get lost in Michael's wording.
While we're on the subject, do you remember any of the flaws or
issues the article pointed out? ADP's were a fledgling technology
in 2000, so it's possible that the problems were addressed in
later versions.

Some of them were, and those fixes caused new bugs that were just as
bad. Then the fix for those bugs caused the previous fix to revert.

DAPs were heavily criticized as incomplete and basically useless,
and ADPs as a flawed effort (Michael pointed out that the workset
and the layers between ADP and database were the same or more than
between MDB and database).

By making a travesty out of minor
issues,

This is not something that Michael Kaplan has ever been guilty of
doing.

Oh, and you know this how? On his own website, he actually has
(had?) a response to people who found him to be overly negative or
emotional. Whether you agree or disagree that he is, obviously
it's something that others besides me have accused him of.

I would say the accusation is completely unfounded. Completely.

My experience is that all of his opinions bear careful
consideration, as they are based on deep knowledge of the
subjects in question.

Quite true. But I have personally seen him rant at least as much
as anybody else, if not more, and whether it's based in fact or
not, a rant is still a rant, and may make something out to be more
of a problem than it is.

I like rants. It shows that somebody cares about what they are
writing about.

I'd say his arrogance is justified. The kind of abuse he took for
years on Usenet for simply telling the truth always amazed me.
People very frequently attacked him as the bearer of the bad
news, as though they didn't want to face up to reality.

That might be an excuse for him to be pissed, but that's certainly
no excuse for arrogance. In fact, I can't really think of an
excuse for someone to be arrogant. Besides, if you can't take a
little heat, then you don't belong in newsgroups.

Arrogance is in the eye of the beholder, seems to me. I never found
Michael particularly arrogant. I found him sometimes dismissive of
those who'd demonstrated themselves to be undeserving of his
attention, but that's not the same thing as arrogant.

As I understood it, it was his arrogant "my way or the highway"
attitude that made him persona non grata there, and I believe
that happened well in advance of ADP.

This situation was quite different. Michael wrote the replication
conflict wizard that shipped with A2K, so he was obviously on
good terms with the Access team throughout the A2K development
process. It was after the publication of his "emperor has no
clothes" article that MS cut him off. That didn't last too long
(he is now an MS employee, of course), but it was a major problem
for him for a while.

I wasn't aware that he was back at MS now,

Not "back" -- he was never an MS employee, just a contractor. He was
hired by MS on the internationalization team in 2003 or 2004
(thereabouts -- don't recall for certain).

but then, I don't exactly try to
keep track of his life. :-) As for the details of why MS gave him
the boot, only he and MS know that for sure, but my impression
from comments I heard around that time was that there were
personality conflicts.

I know the story the way Michael told it, which is most likely to be
as unflattering to MS as anyone's version, and he always said that
the article hurt a lot of feelings on the Access team because he was
criticizing them for things that they knew were not completely
implemented and cutting them no slack on it.

Of course, at the same time as that happened, he was greatly
praising them for the nice improvements in Jet 4, especially with
regard to replication (which was his specialization back then).

And therein lies my point...he told the truth as he saw it. How
he sees things, however, is almost invariably tainted by his
opinion of his own greatness.

I completely disagree on that. Michael has always been forceful
in the expression of his opinions, but never at the expense of
truth.

That's not what I was saying. What I was saying was that his
opinions are tainted by his perceptions (as are all our opinions).

I don't see this as a salient observation -- the sky is blue, but
that doesn't have any impact on any of my posts (well, if it's
cloudy, I guess, I might be in a bad mood...).

For example, many
people believe VB.Net is great, many people believe it's
inherently flawed. In fact, both are right, it simply depends on
where they're coming from and what they need out of the language.

Some people (like me) think it's neither great or inherently flawed.
It just *is*. That doesn't mean I can't criticize it for its
failings nor praise it for what's good about it.

But getting back to Michael, his
opinions of the relative importance of some issues often don't
match many other peoples', for right or for wrong. There's no
doubt in my mind, however, that if he brings up a point, it's
something to at least be looked at...just don't think that because
he says a product has flaws that it's a big deal. All products
have flaws, the question is whether it's really an issue for any
given person.

If his article had raised issues that were insignificant, I wouldn't
be mentioning it. In fact, I've never known Michael to criticize any
MS product on trivial grounds. Indeed, he and I frequently got in
arguments over MS products, with him defending MS! That's why I have
always seen him as having the highest level of integrity, because he
would criticize MS where he fault it was warranted and defend MS
when he thought *that* was warranted.

Well, you're very lucky. I know any number of very experienced
Access developers who desperately wanted ADPs to work, but
eventually, after years of struggle, completely gave up on them.

I'd love to hear from those people, because never mind that I've
never had problems, I've never heard of others who have (within
the limits of the technology, mind you...if someone wants to cache
something in a local table, that's a simple limitation of the
technology, not a problem per se).

Check out comp.databases.ms-access for posts from Steve Jorgensen
and Lyle Fairfield. Both gave ADPs a huge effort and eventually,
both gave up on them entirely.

If the product were as flawed as you seem to suggest, I suspect we
would have heard a LOT more about it in a forum like this...yet I
can't remember the last time somebody said it was a flawed
technology here, not counting this discussion.

I think a lot of the people who are satisfied with ADPs were not
Access developers before, so they don't know what they are missing
in terms of a well-designed and reliable front-end development
platform.

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/
.

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