visual studio team suite use with Access?

[alfaista]

hello,

i am investigating the best platform to develop a database application. we
are more than likely going to need to use Access, as this needs to be
portable from site to site and not all sites will have SQL, or anything at
all. but all sites will have Access.
this application will be somewhat complex in what it does, but not tons of
data involved. so there will be many tables, with complex relationships, but
not a lot of data in each table.
it also needs to be developed by more than on developer.

so, my questions are...is Access still usable for this application? (i see
no reason why not, but i am open.). would using VS team suite help with the
multiple developer issues, and/or database modeling/design?
i do not know much about the team suite, or the database part of VS, the
only thing i have used has been VB.

thanks for any help or suggestions!!!

 

[aaron.kempf]

dude don't use MDB for anything; are you retarded?

only lamers use MDB

use SQL Server; and if you don't know it then get a friggin book

grow up kid

 

[Larry Linson]

As wonderful as Visual Studio Team Suite may be for developing distributed
enterprise DotNet applications, it will be nothing but a complication and a
hindrance in developing an Access application. If, however, you mean "Can
you use Visual Studio to develop an application that will use a Jet (all
versions) or Access (2007 only) database for storing data," the answer is
"yes".

If you clarify, with more specifics on what you want to do, we can be more
specific in responding. For example, do you intend this to be a web-based
application, or is it single user or multiuser on a LAN (in which case,
Access may be the ideal software tool to create the application as well as
the database); can you use Windows Terminal Services to let each user
execute on the central server; etc.?

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP

 

[alfaista]

this is an internal development project of an application that our employees
will take to customer sites with them.
therefore, it may be single, or multiple user across a LAN. highly doubtful
that it will be web based, i can not see that happening. our customers are
government agencies and this will very likely be sensitive data and limited
to just a few users. i suppose it could be on the intranet of an agency, but
again i seriously doubt it.

let me see if i can explain the basics, besides what i have above.
the user will get an inital set of data. every change to this data needs to
be tracked. whether one field gets changed, or a record added or deleted.
the original needs to be saved, and the change tracked. one co-worker likes
doing this with linked-lists, i am less of a fan of that as the final answer.

a data modeling tool would be helpful i think, for the developers to agree
and get on the same page.
there are calculations that need to be done of course, and reports and such,
but the main data issue is the tracking of any saved changes. and reporting
at what level they were done and for what reason.
i.e.:
initial data (always saved)
change set one (can be many changes against inital data, when set is
"closed" it becomes a new "set" of data)
change set two (can be off of initial data, or off of change set one)
change set three....etc.....

now, storing each record again and again isn't such a good idea, if they are
never changed from one set to the next, why bother? thus the data modeling
idea and the linked-lists concepts from one of the developers.

once this is "completed" the data will be saved out in a history area, and
new intial data loaded and started over. usually there is just one user
making the changes, with other users able to view the data.

no idea about Windows Terminal Services. should we look into that?

hope this made a modicum of sense!

 

[aaron.kempf]

hey Larry-- how do you get Visual Studio to start using the AccDB
datatype?

any way to do it short of acting buying Office 2007 LoL


I'm not buying Office 2007 until ADP bugs get fixed