A question came in today from Michael about terminal services scale: I have been using the Access 2003 runtime in conjunction with the sagekey scripts for a couple of years. My deployments have had pretty light concurrent user counts, 10-20 is typical. I have a client that would need it to scale to at least 100 concurrent users, possible 200-300. I know the scalability of an app would be impacted by what the front end is doing and so forth. The hardware side can be whatever it needs to be, so I'd...

Today’s guest blogger is Michael Groh, co-author of the popular Access 2007 Bible . The VBA language is not, by default, case-sensitive. A statement such as   CBool("XYZ" = "xyz") will always return True. You might come across this issue in cases such as the following: If strOne = strTwo Then   ' Perform some operation here End If Consider what happens if it's important to know that the strings differ only by case. By default, VBA will never report a difference in the...

Today’s guest writer is Garry Robinson, Access MVP and proud new owner of past Smart Access journals. I asked him to tell the community about the new home for Smart Access. Hello Clint and Microsoft Access lovers, I am happy to announce that my company has purchased the exclusive rights to Smart Access. A great magazine that was put together by over a 100 Access professionals for more than 10 years. Purchasing all these articles (300+) realizes an ambition that I have had for years to rapidly grow...

The folks @ UtterAccess have produced an useful article titled The Beginner’s guide to ODBC . This is an attempt to equip the developers who want to use Access as a front-end client to any RDBMS (Relational DataBase Management System) backend (ie, SQL Server, DB/2, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL) with the right questions to explore and ask during design and development. As we cannot cover every special case or all the nuisances that each developers must deal with, it is hoped that,by reading over this...

About a month ago, we posted a Power Tip from Edwin Blancovitch about creating shortcut menus by using VBA . However, if for some reason you’re not interested in cracking open the Visual Basic Editor, there is a way to create shortcut menus (the menus that appear when you right-click an object) just using macros. See this article on Office Online to see how to get started. Have an Access Power Tip that you want to share? Send it to Mike and Chris at accpower@microsoft.com .

Once of the most interesting trends in the web application space has been a refocus on user experience improvements. Often times Access gets a bad reputation for not keeping up with the times from a look and feel perspective. Our good friend Brandon from OpenGate Software created a great white paper (with sample database) on how to bring these improvements to your existing Access databases. Here are some highlights: Fade-In/Out Dynamically Expand/Contract Form Elements   Hover Effects  ...

Recently Maarten a blog reader asks: TempVars (introduced with Access 2007) are great! But I have some problems in using them. I created a query with a TempVar as criteria. When I run the query it shows the correct data. But when I open the query in VBA using OpenRecordset, I get the message: “Run-time error 3061: Too few parameters. Expected 1.” This is the expected behavior. TempVars are defined in the scope of the Access Application object. When you use the CurrentDB.OpenRecordset method, the...

Today’s guest blogger is Vinny Malanga. Vinny is the CTO of IMI Software, Inc. , which specializes in software development for the property management industry. I recently received a call from a client asking for help on how to use the SQL Server bigint data type in a disconnected Access .accdb file. Here’s the scenario: There’s a SQL Server table that is using the bigint data type as an identity column. In this scenario, the Access database is completely disconnected from the SQL Server 2008 database...

Sal Ricciardi of the Access Developer Documentation team has produced a couple of articles for MSDN that address two commonly-asked date-related questions about Access: Using Excel Date Functions in Access 2007 shows how to use Excel’s NETWORKDAYS function from within Access. Counting the Number of Working Days in Access 2007 describes how you can create the Weekdays and Workdays user-defined functions to count the number of working days between two dates. Thanks Sal!

Today’s guest writer is Shawn Sullivan from the Office Shared team. I have asked him to talk about the work he has done to help organizations move to newer versions of Office. In March, we made a post about Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM), which is a suite of tools to help analyze your environment for migration to Office 2007. Its primary function is to scan Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access files in the Office 97-2003 binary file format, and provide analysis of any issues those files...