Joint Engine Technology :)

Hey Erik, great that you started posting, this is a long-awaiting blog for Access devs community!

Nice to see you join the bandwagon. :)

Hi Erik, Thanks for creating this blog. It should be a very helpful took for the development community. I'd like to hear what you can say about how the security model has changed for the new "Jet" engine, if at all. Lynn Trapp

MS Access MVP

Hello Erik! Great to see people will be blogging now. All we have do is have a conversation about collation support in the new engine being brought up to at least Windows 2000 (and maybe even XP/Server 2003).... Feel free to have people contact me if there is interest in adding new collations to narrow the gap? :-)

Hmm, it took 3 days to find out how to post a comment here! It's not at all obvious, when (like me) you have been reading these blogs for some time - and commenting on some of them - but have never created an account or had to log-on. Could you have an anonymous comment button? It's tremendously exciting to hear about the new copy of Jet. I've been wondering how to move my flagship Access/Jet application into the future. This puts a whole new light on things! Looking forward to hearing lots more,

TC

Hi there! I've had this question for some time now, why isn't Access using the SQL Server engine instead of Jet? Microsoft seems to still invest in various flavour of that engines for it's different product that need relational capabilities. Why not focus on making one modular enough that could fit multiple purposes while maintaining a common engine at its core? Will Access 12 use the Reporting Services engine for reports? I have big hopes regarding Office 12 integration with SharePoint v3, I'm very excited to see what's coming on that side. Thanks, Mathieu Isabel

ETFS Inc.

Thanks for the comments (and mails) and I've now got anonymous commenting turned on. Sorry for the inconvenience of having to log on. Lots of comments about the database engine. Probably the best way to address them is through the next post, so please hang tight on that front. Here were a couple of other questions: Highlight a control easily & in continuous forms - This is an interesting point and one that I don't think we've made progress on. Definitely makes sense and something we'll look into. Reporting services for reporting - more on this later, but the short answer is no, we'll be using Access's existing reports engine. There are a number of reasons for this, but the main one is backwards compatibility wiht the 100's of millions of Access databases in the world. I'll do a post later on Access's reporting story and how it fits with the rest of the Microsoft BI stack. Thanks, Erik

Great to see this blog - looking forward to seeing what's new in Access! So many questions, I don't know where to start. I'll just wait and see what topics you post on, then go from there. :)

Whatever cool things you add to Access 12 can you please make it so that forms in the 'user and group permissions' window are listed in alphabetical order and that the window is resizable. With a huge DB it's a real pain having to scroll around this tiny little list box. Thanks! I have a whole list of annoying things that need fixing.

This may be answered in a future post... It sounds like there will be two versions of Jet. One managed by the SQL Server team, and the other by the Access Team. Where does that leave apps that use Jet, but not Access? MSDN shows Jet as being deprecated. Thanks, Ryan

This blog is a really good idea. Thank you for it.

A question for you. I've been developing with Access for about 8 years, yet there is no certification process that will help me show potential customers that I know what I am doing. MOUS has little to do with developer abilities. If I remember correctly, there used to be certification for Access 95. There is a whopping great hole on the certification front. It seems that the powers that be don't really see Access developers as real developers. Or have I missed somthing?

My heart dropped when I read "multiple values for a single field". I thought wow, you've capitulated to all those beginners who don't understand about normalization! But it's really smart to implement that in a proper relational manner "behind the scenes". This means you don't loose the folks who are perfectly happy designing directly to the relational model. Very exciting! Hanging out to hear more.

Bad move, very very bad move. From my days running hosting servers I remember that there are loads of web sites that run off Microsoft Access db's. I can think of very few providers that will install Access onto web servers just so people can use the new features. And can you imagine telling people that to use your desktop app (where I work we just released an application that stores it's offline data in Access) they need to purchase and install access as well. I see the web market moving away from Access with this. I just hope there is an option to save to the old format in the new Access 12.

I saw some comments about continous forms- How about that the labels of the field could be linked to the field and dragged from the detail to the header. It is a minor point, but it drives me nuts. Also it makes the drag and drop design easier. I find myself cutting and pasting dozens of controls

Thanks for listening