Office 2010 SP1 on track for late June

Here is what I think Ryan: I think Microsoft should put a far bigger effort into debugging Access. While the features commonly used by casual Access users are properly debugged, the Access developer on the other hand experiences a very buggy and unstable product. This situation is disgusting considering the vast revenue Microsoft has collected from this product over decades. If you disagree, I challange you to release the entire unresolved bug list for Access 2010 and let your customers and critics decide for themselves if you are making a reasonable effort to debug the product or, as I believe, cheating your customers instead.

I second that, jsmock. Since 97 Access is getting worse and worse. :-(

Microsoft Access team simply doesn't fix bugs. They are killing Access, I'm worrying it will be the next after Visual Fox Pro... :-(

It's funny you mention Visual FoxPro VladmirC,, I agree totally that Microsoft killed FoxPro  with neglect.  Although I worked with Foxpro for many years, and really enjoyed working with it prior to when Microsoft bought out Fox Software, I dumped it a few years after the takeover. I was sick and tired of spending more time researching bugs and workarounds than programming. It had many wonderful design ideas, even after Microsoft took over, but as with so many of Microsoft's products they could not be bothered to debug it properly. I'm close to making the same decision on Access, I doubt I'll use Access for anything other than prototyping going forward. It's still great for that..

This is not the kind of fix that one would expect in a SP, but I am curious to know if the Access/Office dev team will ever be able to fix the contention issue which has been dogging the product for a decade or so (and not before that if I recall). I'm talking about when you have more than one version of Office installed, and you start up say Access 2000 instead of Access 2003, the way the new version has to register itself; essentially say to the OS, "I'm the relevant version of Office." Esp with later versions that switching can take a long time. Sometimes things get messed up. Now I have Office 2003 and 2000 on my main dev box, because they get along fairly well (doens't take long to switch), and Access 2003 is what I use for most applications. Office 2010 is on a vm. I've never even tried to put it on my main machine because I expect it'd start a battle each time I have to switch Access versions.

Is there any hope of this ever getting done right? I know it's in the Office team's arena...but you guys probably know and you're the one's who can tell them that the current situation is a pain for your users.

How should be deploy our 64 bit applications that support Microsoft Access 2010?  Do we need to provide both versions of an ACCDE in case a customer doesn't have the upgrade?  

In our Total Access Emailer and Total Access Statistics products, we offer runtime versions of the library that our customers can re-distribute with their Access applications. Will they need both too?

Finally, is there any overlap of this incompatibility issue with the ADO problem in Windows 7's SP1 update?

MichaelS said:

"I am curious to know if the Access/Office dev team will ever be able to fix the contention issue which has been dogging the product for a decade or so"

I would not hold my breath on this one. I believe that if you look closely at how COM works in general, it should become apparent why reconfiguration-per-switch is the best solution (by virtue that it is least worst alternatives). They can fix it but not without repercussions such as breaking backward compatibility, I believe. I generally look at side-by-side installations as a temporary solution rather than as a permanent state of affair and for that reason, I much prefer to use VMs and separate versions into their own VM. I realize that this is not feasible for everyone but at least with Win7's XP mode, it's not so far fetched.

Luke said:

"How should be deploy our 64 bit applications that support Microsoft Access 2010?  Do we need to provide both versions of an ACCDE in case a customer doesn't have the upgrade?"

Yes, and that is true also with MDE since both *DE files are compiled and therefore cannot be re-compiled for different bitness so if you intend to support a mixed bitness environment, it is necessary to maintain both 32-bit *DE and 64-bit *DE, though you can create both files from the same *DB but with the appropriate XX-bit Access.

Will the TIF and TIFF viewer applications (MODI from 2003 and 2007) be included in the SP1 updates?  I find it very inefficient to tell us who are deploying Office using SCCM to run the 2007 Office installation to regain access to the MODI applications.  Our company utilizes many different web sites that send documents as TIF files and what is included with Office 2010 only allows you to view the first page of a TIF file (if it is a multi-paged document).

I really hope they fixed the bug where the & shortcut keys stop working when used in a tab container.  To reproduce, setup a tab container, add two textboxes in a tab each with its own & shortcut key.  You can use the shortcut key to get in, but once you're in, you can't use the shortcut key to get to the next one until the form is requeried.  Seems to be on a per form basis because I have two subforms each with their own tab containers with shortcuts and the bug happens independently per form.  I was hoping to migrate a large app from Access 2000 to Access 2010 but the users would kill me when their shortcut keys stop working.