Color Support in Access 12

I'll say it yet again: What about ADPs??? Why do you guys always ignore ADPs???? To me MDB & ACCDB are utterly irrelevant, as I would never use such an insecure data model. (Please answer both questions above. And PLEASE, try to address ADPs in EVERY post.)

I sure hope you finally allow setting the back/fore colors for a whole column (field). And I hope you've made some improvements to conditional formatting (especially speed-wise)

Sorry about not mentioning ADPs... They will work the same as mdbs. You can use the new colors but we won't display them in the property sheet and color pickers. This is to keep people from designing objects that won't render well in previous versions. If you want to do back and fore colors per column continous forms are the way to go in this version. You loose live column resize but with the new layout and stack stuff it is pretty easy to resize columns. Access hasn't made significant changes to conditional formatting but the Excel team has done great work in this area blogs.msdn.com/.../11358.aspx.

Speaking of ADP's...how do you make one from scratch?

From the getting started experience click on New Database. Click on the folder icon that specifies the path to bring up the File New Database dialog. Change the files of type dropdown to Access Data Projects. This is the same way you would create an mdb file.

Are we going to see coloured buttons in the new version? Also will tab controls blend correctly when you change the colours? I use Access 2000 and there's a section in the top-right of the tab control that does not match the changed form colour.

I welcome the new color features very much. Like many others, I also really hope you will address some long standing existing issues: * Tab control background color issue (see Deano's comment above) * Bitmap color rendering issues in Access

E.g. Colors frequently messed up in the following cases: - When buttons with custom bitmap are disabled (colors seem to get inverted rather than greyed) - Bitmaps are viewed over a Citrix / Terminal Server style connection where colors are limited to 256. This is a very common method of running Access apps in the enterprise. Despite creating the images with 256 colors, etc - they still will render with poor color selections in MS Access whereas the same picture will render correctly in MS Word. * Ability to have both text and a picture on a button * Colored Buttons

I will put together a post on images and some of the other features that help build great looking applications. Give me a couple days...

Re: creating a new ADP

Ah-hah! You hid it! Thanks though.

Am I missing something or does this imply that you are making no changes to ADPs? I would be very sorry to hear this as there are numerous issues with this side of Access development that need to be addressed. And some improvements would be nice too.

Near as I can tell, those lists of hundreds of requested fixes and improvements on UtterAccess and several other sites have been Utterly ignored. Instead we get Sharepoint (which will be used by 0.01% of Access users), a few primitive ways to add colors, and hand-holding for the intellectually challenged users. Big deal. It's about time the Access team started listening to its core users. Instead they go out and look at a handful of Access dev sites, and pretend that they are representative of the majority. I am also disappointed at what appears to be the self-congratulatory tone of the Access team. I really resent being fed superlatives like Great! Cool! about new features that add little new functionality, and apparently leave all the old bugs intact. To make matters even worse for mdb-developers, they remove the security model… I would like to see a list of the 300+ requests and bug fixes made by UA and other lists, and a description of what action was taken on them. If the Access team just addressed all those bugs and minor requests, and discarded all the UI candy, I would be much happier.

We've actually done a lot of work on ADP's in 12, but sadly much of it doesn't show. The bulk of the work was simply to make ADP's continue to work in Access, and it involved refreshing the design tools we use for ADP's so that they'd continue to build, would pass muster for security, and would work against SQL Server 2005. The main new things you'll notice for ADP's are that they run against SQL 2005 and that the new design tools work against ADP's (e.g. the new report & form tools I'll be showing next). Clearly there's more to do here, but we believe the new design tools will be a significant boon to ADP developers as well as all other Access users, and the ability to use SQL 2005 is very important.

I'm not totally sure how to respond to "Disgruntled", but here's a try. One thing to remember about the Access team is we're pretty much all Access developers as well as people who build Access. Most of us have at least a handful of databases we've built and maintain for friends and family to run their businesses, schools, manage fundraising, etc. Some of these databases are simple, but many of them are pretty complex and are real apps. As devs, we not only understand the issues you raise, but we live through them just as you do. Of course we also keep up on UtterAccess and a number of other sites and see the lists of features and issues out there. We understand those issues and have a personal stake in fixing them. So, what have we addressed? Well, we've addressed many of the issues directly, we've eliminated a number of other ones by changing the way devs interact with the product, and some we'll have to live with for another version. Some of these have come out in the blog already (e.g. the mouse wheel works in the VBE), more will come later as I get deeper into the app, and many will be things to discover when you get a chance to use Access 12. I tried when I started the blog to go from the details up, and it just didn't work - it was too hard to understand the details without context. So, as I noted back in February, we've restarted from the top down and are gradually getting to more and more of those details. In the meantime, please continue to be patient. And I promise that we not only care about Access developers, we are Access developers, and we'll continue to build features that devs want and need.

Is there going to be an update to AC03 or do we have to wait 2 years after release to use SQL 2005?

No, we won't be able to update 2003 to work against SQL 2005. I know this is a pain and I appologize.