This post provides an overview of features and components that will be deprecated in the upcoming release of Access 2010. A decision to remove a feature or component from the product is never a trivial one; we therefore have put a lot of thought when deciding to remove functionality. We believe it will benefit the majority of our customers by helping us to make forward progress. Microsoft recommends that when you develop new Access applications, upgrade or modify existing applications, avoid using...

Albert D. Kallal (Access MVP) has published a great video demo of an application that he build for tracking meetings rooms . He even has built a fancy calendar control that renders in the web using data macros and bound controls. it is a good example of the types of things you can do in the browser with Access + Access Services. Here is my favorite quote from the video: I find this new table level programming model encourages designs that allow you to quickly react to your changing business needs...

Last week I wrote about the Office 2010 Technical Preview bevy of announcements. This post kicks off a series of conversations about what is new in Microsoft Access 2010. As a team, our passion is to help people quickly and easily create databases tailored to their needs with tools that are affordable, fast and efficient. Access 2010 is the next iteration in this quest. Here is a peek at some of the many changes you will see: Get started faster . One thing we have learned from the Access 2007 template...

After a long, hard effort the stars have finally aligned.  The Access Developer Extensions team is very happy to announce the release of the Access 2007 Developer Extensions and the Access 2007 Runtime.   Updated Jan 2009: Here is the latest link to the 2007 Developer Extensions http://blogs.msdn.com/access/archive/2009/01/20/access-developer-extensions-2007-updates.aspx   Here is the link for the 2007 Access Runtime: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D9AE78D9...

A great opportunity has just come up for you folks to get some feedback into the Access dev process. Dany Hoter, one of our product planners who is studying the Access business, is interested in talking to Access developers to understand better the kind of solutions they create. He would also love to discuss your thoughts on the competitive landscape of data tracking and application building, especially any insights you may have on the world of web applications and services. If you are interested...

The Office Sustained Engineering team has announced the official ship date . Highlights for Access include: The ability to export reports to Excel has been added. Fixes for issues with the import data wizards, report printing and previewing, macros, Excel integration, and date filters. Updates to Access Developer Extensions and runtime (including as a patch) are now included in SP2. We will have a complete list of fixes available on the 28th.

The Access team is looking to make improvements to the form design experience by helping users get started building powerful and interesting forms. Most Access professionals have a set of forms that they re-use quite a bit. What we are interested in specifically is how these common forms are laid out. There are obviously re-used patterns that you are using in terms of how you layout controls to provide your customers with a compelling experience; we’d love to see examples of them. Ask yourself the...

Dick Moffat is a professional Access developer who has been using Access 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 to build databases that run on Windows but live in SharePoint. We have a chat about how you can leverage your existing Access skills and bring your current databases into SharePoint to make sharing databases and working with users in remote locations fast & easy. If you are building something cool with Access/Access Services we would love to feature you on The Access Show.

Renaud posted some comments to the previous post about transparency forms and made some really cool enhancements to the code, along with a note about using a class module to make it easier to use. This is how I use transparency forms in my own implementations so let's update the post to show how you can do this with a class. I've incorporated Renaud's changes to the API code which adds the following functionality: Disable transparency when Access is running under Remote Desktop Cover the entire screen...

Way back in October, I posted an overview of Access. We've finally got a complete customer-ready overview for the product that will be going up on the Access site at http://www.microsoft.com/access . If you'd like a printable version of this paper, it is available here . This takes longer than you might imagine, so I thought I'd post it here as well. Even though I understand many of you are looking for more technical details, this blog is fairly widely read and I know there are many who would like...