I would disagree with you on many points.

1. Access is a horrible platform for large databases. While it can get to a
rather large size, it is a file based DB, which means perf degrades
horribly. I would say 50MB is a good theoretical max, although I have seen
Access DBs in the ridiculous range.

2. Access is great for single developers, but bad for team development. It
is difficult to impossible to get a team working on the same solution,
unless Access is merely a data repository.

3. Access creates monolithic applications, which means there is little
flexibility in distributing the work as your company grows.

Access certainly fits a niche. It has a wonderful designer and allows you to
leverage your work with forms, queries, reports, etc. Much of the work can
be done without a huge amount of code. But, you pay a price, as you lock
yourself into the Access solution. If you later outgrow, you end up
rewriting everything.

I am not knocking Access, as it is a great product, but it definitely has
its limitations. Whether Jerome should use Access or not depends on his
final goal.

Lots of growth - Access as a backend only. Not wise to lock into to Access
forms.
Speed of getting product to market - Access may be the best option, if
Jerome is an Access developer
Application needs to scale - Access as backend, with plans on scaling data
up later (or MSDE from start)

There are other items to consider, of course.

--
Gregory A. Beamer
MVP; MCP: +I, SE, SD, DBA

***********************************************
Think outside the box!
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"Brian" wrote in message
...
"Jerome" wrote in message
...
Hi, I'm a bit confused ... when would I rather write an database
application using MS Access and Visual Basic and when (and why) would I
rather write it using Visual Studio .Net?

Is it as easy in Visual Studio to create reports and labels as it's in
Access?`

The advantage of VS.net is that not every user needs Access, right? And
that would eliminate the Access version problem as well I guess.

I've both done stuff in Access as well as asp.net

Thanks!

Access is a vastly superior development platform for database
applications:
the cost of development is far lower, and it has wonderful
database-centric
features like linked subforms and continuous forms. The only reason to
use
anything other than Access to build a database application is if you want
it
on the internet, which is something that you just can't do with Access.
Even if you have a large user population or demanding security/resilience
requirements, it's still best to use Access, linked to a sever database
engine such as SQL Server.

If you buy the Office Developer Edition, or whatever Microsoft is calling
it
these days, you can freely distribute a run-time version of Access so that
you don't need to buy Access for all your users.