Tony Toews said:
RUBBISH!!!! The next version of Office will have VBA in it.
Furthermore there are lots of developers, testers and PMs and
Microsoft working on Access. It is not dead.
Just to add to what Tony had to say:
From Version 1.1 on, there has always been _someone_ whispering rumors about
the impending demise of Access itself, or of some important
feature/function. It has almost been as if there were an active
"anti-Access underground", but I suspect it has actually just been users of
other DB software who (quite rightly) felt threatened that Access was
outdoing their software and were "just hoping" that some rumor would "stick"
and drive away Access customers.
As to VBA... VBA was dropped from the Apple Macintosh version of Microsoft
Office 2008, but the howl of anguish from Mac users of Office was so great
that it has been announced that the next version of Mac Office will again
have VBA (note that Mac Office does not include a Mac version of Access, in
any case). As rumors strengthened, about that time, that VBA would
disappear from Windows Office, I believe the howls of anguish that it might
not be in future versions of Access were loud enough to change the mind of
anyone in Redmond who might have had such an idea.
Certain features of Access have been dropped or de-emphaisized, from time to
time -- some examples are Data Access Pages (DAP), Access Projects (ADP),
and Access' Workgroup Security. In the case of the first two, it appears
that Microsoft overestimated user demand for what they introduced and users
were not so eager that they would live through the limitations of the
earlier releases in hope that things would get better. In the case of the
last, that was useful sometimes in keeping users of developed databases from
stumbling over their own fingertips and getting in trouble, but the security
has been easily crackable for a long time. It finally got SO crackable that
you can, for free, find a downloadable package that will break security on a
well-secured database even if you do not have the Workgroup file to go along
with the database you are trying to break into.
But, neither DAP nor ADP were "widely used" and existing databases in both
will still run, and in fact, though new features were not included in ADP,
it was updated and you can still develop and maintain ADPs in Access 2007.
Data can be secured by using a server databases' security if you are using a
server DB (e.g., Microsoft SQL Server, or one of the Sybase products, or
Oracle, or IBM DB2 or Informix, or other ODBC-compliant database) as your
datastore, or if you use Microsoft Office Sharepoint for that purpose, as
you now can, it also has its own security.
Like Tony, I am aware that extensive effort still goes into new releases of
Access, and I've seen no indication from any 'Softie that Access itself, or
any substantially-useful feature, might be dropped.
That said, because Access' own security was not strong, and because it has
been dropped from the new ACCDBs of Access 2007, I would think long and
carefully before using it to create a commercial software package. I've
been doing Access development since version 2, but mine has always been
"bespoke systems" for particular users, not for "shrink-wrap" or
"downloadable" commercial or shareware apps.
As I've never looked into creating the kind of application you are
considering, I wouldn't be a good source for discussing alternatives. I am
_not_ a fan of Visual Studio, though, and that's no secret.
Larry Linson
Microsoft Office Access MVP
