I know it is off topic but there are a few blogs posts of MSDN I found interesting. IE 8 Performance - good post about the work the IE team has been doing around performance. I love browser performance work. Windows 7 – Approach to System Performance – post by Steven talking about the different elements of performance. Boot Performance – post by Michael Fortin about what the fundamentals team is doing for Windows 7.

One thing about being on the Access team that I enjoy is seeing some of the great work being done in the Access community. Among the forefront of this community is FMS , who is the leading developer of Access add-ins. FMS recently announced a preview version of Total Access Analyzer 2007 which is a tool that helps you create better Access databases. There are too many new features to list here, but here is a small subset that might be interesting to note: Support for the .ACCDB file format added...

Aleksandar Jakšić, who is one of the testers on our team, has written an article that shows you how you can use the Access Database Engine from native applications written in C/C++. The article shows you how to to the Access Database Engine using C or C++, but has a great discussion of the data stack used by Access and some of the different components of the engine. He also breaks down the different methods for accessing data using native technologies such as DAO, ADO, OLE DB, and ODBC. The...

Crosoft releases Access Object Navigator This tool is not only for Microsoft Access 2007, but also supports versions 2000, 2002 and 2003. Once installed, Navigator provides a method to develop software applications without creating additional switchboards. They have a free trial if you want to check it out. Long Island Power Authority uses a custom Access application to crunch data The program HDR developed for the Neptune project proved to be effective in meeting permit requirements for TSS monitoring...

Today’s guest writer is Josh Meisels, our intern this summer. He is heading back to school next week but wanted to share information about one of his summer projects. Access 2007 made a huge push to create useful, ready-to-use database templates that users could download from Office Online and get started with Access. The number of downloads exceeded our expectations (the Access 2007 contacts database is downloaded about 60,000 times a month). We thought the templates were pretty good; however, in...

Access 2007 in many ways is a different product for end users. In previous releases it was very difficult to be successful creating a new application without using help, taking a class, reading a book, or asking the community—information workers that wanted to use the product had to really dive into the product. Sure we had some templates but there weren’t discoverable and the team hadn’t made big investments in that area. Internally, we referred the Access 2003 boot screen as the gray screen of...

The article Create a tabbed form , and the companion sudden demo Watch this: Create a tabbed form ,  are now live on Office Online.

The famous Allen Browne has published two new articles on Office Online. Validation rules Want to ensure that users enter valid data? Validation rules might be the answer. This article describes when validation rules are appropriate, and provides examples of commonly-used validation rules. Relationships between tables Once you learn how to design tables and create relationships between them, you can take advantage of the most powerful data storage and retrieval features of Microsoft Office Access...

Mike Alexander an Microsoft MVP in Dallas is putting on an Access Power User Workshop October 20-21, 2008. The cost is $600 but Mike will offer a 30% discount for anyone that mentions they found it through the Access blog. Some of the topics that will be covered during the two-day workshop: Advanced Query Tips and Techniques Advanced UserForm Controls and Technique Enhancing your Application GUI Working with Recordsets Doing some Cool Things with Windows APIs Creating Dashboards Using Access Reports...

There is a flattering blog post Microsoft Gets Blogging by Thomas Hawk. Some interesting quotes include: I'm not sure when exactly or if it's ever been an official sort of thing, but it seems like Microsoft of all of the companies that I've seen out there interacting with bloggers consistently gets it right. And I read random stories and blog posts like the one above where it just seems like some Microsoft employee is hanging out reading some blog at random and takes the initiative to interact very...