Re: Advice Needed...

"Robert Morley" <rmorley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:uQUuUU$mHHA.2452@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Access is one of the most horrible applications I've ver used. It's
completely unstable and extremely outdated. If something badly needs a
complete update it's Access. A complete break from the past could
potentially make a top app and really revolutionise internal apps.

You're the first person I've ever heard of who actually dislikes
Access...at least to that extent. What do you see as wrong with it?

I'm definately not the first person. The problems are extensive but
basically you're not making a real app. With VB6 you have to work to add the
required functionality. In access you have to work to remove a lot of
functionality in an attempt to make it look like a real app. The forms just
look plain ugly and outdated because they made all their own controls. This
also eliminates the possibility of using APIs on the controls because they
are not real windows controls. Then there's the instability of the backend
and problems with customers having different versions.

Oh but they do...they could choose to go the same route they did with
VB.NET and break compatibility with all former applications, forcing all
existing code to be re-written. But that would be a dumb idea, wouldn't
it? ;-)

They could not do that and you know it. It is a different situation to what
has happened with dot net and your analogy doesn't quite hold water. With
VB6 you can still develop apps in vb6 that will run on all OSs. A better
analogy would be if they implemented a new API structure in windows but kept
the old one also, which is exactly what they do all the time.

What do you mean by table inheritance? I think I know (Access supported a
highly limited version of it), but just want to be clear.

I should be able to create a table called Person with FirstName, LastName
etc and then create Staff and Customer tables that inherit from Person. I
haven't ever used it so not sure how well it would work in reality.

That's fair enough. In point of fact, I like at least some of the things
they've done with the language, but they seriously needed to provide SOME
path forward without having to re-write nearly everything from scratch.

I agree. The upgrade wizard is something they gave to a junior programmer on
his first day.

So I've heard. I believe there was some class or some such that
implemented it for you, and I gather that recently, there's been some kind
of linguistic work around that's been discovered, but I don't know the
details. It's still rather limiting that the language doesn't support it
natively.

Have a read of this one, it looks like they tried to have non-zero based
arrays but decided against it for very good reason.
http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2004/03/17/290.aspx

An array of days of the month comes to mind right off hand. Why number it
0 to 30 when it could be 1 to 31?

I would prefer 1 based arrays myself but am more than happy to have all zero
based arrays if that means we have consistancy. I agree it's a little
confusing going from 0 to 30 but this is the same with any list of items.
The first item is index zero, the second is index 1 etc.

I'm suprised a third party hasn't released a better upgrade tool. It
wouldn't be hard to do and would be popular and could be fairly
expensive.

Yes, it would be EXTREMELY popular, I'd imagine.

Could be a good project for those on this group.

Michael


.

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