dotnet windows forms vs. Access

PMK wrote:

On Thu, 7 Jun 2007 12:00:39 -0700, a a r o n _ k e m p f @hotmail.com wrote:

yes, you are wasting your time

Microsoft is going to make a new .NET version of ADP with the next release--
so .NET is not a total waste of time

but it is obvious that ADP is a much much much better platform than .NET

.NET version of an Access Data Project? I don't get it. Tell me more.

Unfortunately Aaron Ke mpf's answer to every problem is ADPs.

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Please respond only in the newsgroups so that others can
read the entire thread of messages.
Microsoft Access Links, Hints, Tips & Accounting Systems at
http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/

Well, I suppose that depends on the type of MS-Office application that you
are using. XP-Pro is multithread but many applications are not multithread
or are poorly implementing any kind of multithread; so you should see no or
little increase of performance. Of course, Windows never stop doing
something and practically all applications are doing things like I/O; so you
will always benefit at least some advantage of running an application on a
bigger machine but by how much? I don't know.

However, you can tell that the more people will have dual and quad cores,
the more the number of applications that will get tuned to use this kind of
power.

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC
E-mail: sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)


"(PeteCresswell)" wrote in message
...
Per "Sylvain Lafontaine" sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no
spam please):
Buying a dual core is now standard and they will soon be replaced with
quad
core as the basic developer machine. (Probably that the price of the quad
core will be cut by two this autumn, if not before.).

Tangential OT Question: Given that I'm running XP Pro and 32-bit
MS Office, would I notice any speed increase from going to a dual
or quad core machine?
--
PeteCresswell

Yeah, even me can get emphatic about something, sometime. It's only that in
this case (ADP), I got tired to hear people coming here to say that even if
they know nothing about SQL-Server, ADP or .NET - from their own admission
and they are proud of it, too - they will now tell us everything we need to
know about these.

As to VB6, I agree with you that on many occasions, it will be faster than
..NET. The problem here is not the performance when you are doing old stuff
like 10 years ago; the problem is when you want to have new stuff. When was
the last time that you have used some kind of datagrid control with VB6 and
that you didn't have the taste of eating your own keyboard after a few days
of work?

Something as simple as having rows of different colors can put VB6 or Access
down to their knees and I won't speak here about stuff like having images or
adding an unbound control to a continuous form or even something very basic
like keeping the multi-rows selection active when the user click on a
button.

When you need to add some extensibility of any kind, VB6/Access are simply
not the way to go.

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC
E-mail: sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)


"Robert Morley" wrote in message
...
I'm surprised you're so emphatic about this, Sylvain. That's not like
you, from what I've seen.

I have to go with Baz on this one. Many, MANY people are moving away from
the .NET framework (Delphi seems to be a popular choice) because VS
2002/2003 were very slow, and while VS 2005 offers some improvements, I
gather, it's still often sluggish when using managed code, and many VB6
developers have no interest in learning C++ as the only unmanaged
alternative. And, of course, there's the nightmare of having to
redistribute the megalith that is the Framework itself.

As for how fast it will eventually be on upcoming OS's/hardware, designing
a system for stuff that's not out yet isn't usually the best idea, as
people have to use this stuff today on their current OS and hardware, not
a year or two (or more) from now. I'm also a firm believer that the
hardware shouldn't have to compensate for the underlying speed of the
application.

I completely disagree that VB6 with COM/DCOM/ActiveX would be a "black
hole". Most tests have shown that in fact, it's significantly faster than
.NET in most cases. There are certainly some tests where .NET outperforms
VB6, and it's a lot more capable in some areas like multithreading, but
most of the articles I've read have put VB6 as 1.5 - 2x faster than the
equivalent .NET code.

But regardless of any of that, even if VS 2005 works faster in any given
scenario, Access is still VBA-based, and as such, you'd still be using
COM, etc. *If* you're going to use Access, which many people still prefer
to .NET solutions, it makes sense that you'd supplement it with VB6/COM if
necessary, rather than using .NET and having to go through Interop.

I will agree that it looks like VB6 is likely to die eventually, and
unfortunately, Microsoft seems to have no understanding of why people are
complaining about that fact. An unmanaged version of VB with greater
backwards compatibility has been suggested, and requested by thousands
(http://classicvb.org/Petition/), but again, it seems unlikely.
Nevertheless, VB6 continues to be supported on Vista, at least in some
fashion, so I don't really see much of a problem continuing to use that
for the time being.

All that said, if .NET is fast enough for you (and as I say, I gather 2005
made improvements in that area), then certainly there's a lot to be said
for it in terms of enterprise development, Internet development, etc. So,
as they say, "if it works, don't knock it." For myself, however, the
sluggishness was intolerable, and at least so far, I'm sticking with VB6
DLLs to back up my Access projects where necessary.


Rob

"Sylvain Lafontaine" sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)
wrote in message ...
Where you should start? Well, you should start with VB6, VC6,
COM/DCOM/MTS, ActiveX and the registries base themselves!

In case you forgot, this whole system was already in the process of
imploding under its own weigth 10 years ago. Doing a program today is no
longer the process of aligning a few text boxes, comboboxes and listboxes
on a simple form, tabbed form or continuous form on an isolated machine,
without internet and maybe even without a LAN.

Take a look at all the criticisms that were made about VB6, unmanaged
C++, the DLL hell, the total lack of security and the constant corruption
of the registries base - to name only that - and now think about what
would be the situation if instead of dumping that into the garbage bin,
MS would have increasing the size of these dinosaurs by a factor of at
least ten to one hundred. Increasing the size of the registry base by a
factor of at least one hundred is not only a reasonable assumption but
it's quite likely a gross under-estimation of the true space that would
have been required to cover the actual possibilities of the .NET
framework using these old technologies.

I agree with you that even on a Core 2 Duo, running the actual Framework
2.0 is slow but if you would have tried to do the same thing with
COM/DCOM/ActiveX - as it was with VB6 - probably that not only your
machine will be running slow but probably that it would have imploding
into a black hole.

Buying a dual core is now standard and they will soon be replaced with
quad core as the basic developer machine. (Probably that the price of the
quad core will be cut by two this autumn, if not before.). Next year, you
will start to see machines with 8 cores and from 16 to 32 Gigs of memory
running Vista 64 bit as the basic machine bought by most developers.
With such power running in 2008, do you really think that people wanted
to keep VB6/VC6 - with a few more gugus here and there - as their main
developer tools?

VB6 was the most popular tool in the past years? So do were DBase3,
Lotus 1-2-3 and Word Perfect. Now, all these tools are gone because
Ashton-Tate, Lotus and Word-Perfect Corporation were believing that
whence you have reached a market share of 90% and more, you don't have to
evolve anymore and your base of loyal users will remain with you for
eternity.

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC
E-mail: sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)


"Baz" wrote in message
...
Where do I start? How about the bloated, festering dotnet framework,
redolent as it is with the promise of versioning nightmares in years
ahead?
How about not being able to write unmanaged code in anything but C++?
How
about it being so damned slow? How about the IDE being so damned awful?
How about MS's sheer, arrogant supidity in trying to kill the world's
most
popular development tool (I refer of course to VB6) without even
providing
backward compatibility?

That's a few gripes about the big stuff, I could think of a lot more if
I
tried. There's LOADS more stuff at the small level, my favourite in
2002/2003 was the godawful combo box which couldn't even do what a VB6
combo
could do, let alone an Access combo. Sure, you can build your own
controls,
which is exactly what I did to get a half-decent combo box (or you can
buy
'em if you didn't already think you'd wasted enough dosh on this
garbage),
but that's what you have to do all the time: so much of it doesn't quite
work as you would expect or want that you spend all your damn time
finding/creating workarounds and alternatives.

Yeeeuk! I don't blame you for puffing this stuff - you've got a living
to
make - but frankly it makes me ill.

"Thomas" wrote in message
...
I still don't know the reasons you were not satisfied with VS/.NET
(except that with learning time)?


Regards,
Thomas

-----------------------------------------
NConstruct - Intelligent Software Factory
http://www.nconstruct.com
-----------------------------------------




Baz wrote:
Yep, that sounds like advertising. As I said, I own VS 2003
Professional
and I consider it to have been a complete waste of money. I do not
believe
that VS 2005 can be so much better that it is worth me spending any
time
on
it, and I'm certainly not going to waste any money buying add-ons for
it.
I'd rather put my efforts into continuing my investigations into
Delphi
(not
that I see Delphi as a serious contender to Access either for
database
applications, it's just that, for the odd occasion when I do
something
for
which I don't consider Access suitable, I'd like to have a serious
and
current alternative to VB6).

"Thomas" wrote in message
...
Baz, you can use free VS 2005 Express and don't buy any 3rd party
component if you don't want, and you can still produce i.e.
continuous
forms with DataGridView component. This is not the best solution but
either is not worse than Access (for which there is no free version
at
all).

IMO, a lot of 3rd party components *do* work very well - guys at
Developer Express, ComponentOne, Infragistic etc. really produce
very
usable products. Serious developer should at least try them before
judge
about their usability or quality. They are also very cheap comparing
to
the price of developing only few percent of their features. Maybe it
sounds like advertising but I really just buy them and use them, and
I
want to share good experience with other developers.


Regards,
Thomas

-----------------------------------------
NConstruct - Intelligent Software Factory
http://www.nconstruct.com
-----------------------------------------




Baz wrote:
Well I haven't got VS 2005 and I'm not likely to get it either
(having
wasted a significant amount of my own money on upgrading from VS 6
to
VS
2002/2003, and then concluding that it sucked so badly that I was
simply
not
interested in using it).

Nor am I impressed by a product which requires me to buy
third-party
add-ons
in order for it to be anywhere near usable.


"Thomas" wrote in message
...
Baz wrote:
I have two things to say to you: linked subforms and continuous
forms.
Baz, I don't think this is an Access advantage. For example, look
at
those tutorials:


http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/to...taGridView.htm

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/N...idlesson1.html
It's fast to create (at least as fast as Access), it has more
features
than Access etc.

This is only one approach - it's similar to Access' one (I don't
like
any of them, though). If you need n-tiered application it's better
to
do
the dynamic grid creation. In both cases you can do it with VS out
of
the box or you can buy some 3rd party components.

--


Regards,
Thomas

-----------------------------------------
NConstruct - Intelligent Software Factory
http://www.nconstruct.com
-----------------------------------------

Yeah, okay, for the type of issues you're talking about, I can see .NET
being more useful. Last time I tried it, though, it was unacceptably slow,
and until someone can prove to me that the speed is now more
acceptable--which I've heard for 2005--and that there's a decent upgrade
path from VB6 (or better yet Access)--which I've never heard from
anybody--it won't ever be on my list of things to upgrade to.



Rob

"Sylvain Lafontaine" sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)
wrote in message ...
Yeah, even me can get emphatic about something, sometime. It's only that
in this case (ADP), I got tired to hear people coming here to say that
even if they know nothing about SQL-Server, ADP or .NET - from their own
admission and they are proud of it, too - they will now tell us everything
we need to know about these.

As to VB6, I agree with you that on many occasions, it will be faster than
.NET. The problem here is not the performance when you are doing old
stuff like 10 years ago; the problem is when you want to have new stuff.
When was the last time that you have used some kind of datagrid control
with VB6 and that you didn't have the taste of eating your own keyboard
after a few days of work?

Something as simple as having rows of different colors can put VB6 or
Access down to their knees and I won't speak here about stuff like having
images or adding an unbound control to a continuous form or even something
very basic like keeping the multi-rows selection active when the user
click on a button.

When you need to add some extensibility of any kind, VB6/Access are simply
not the way to go.

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC
E-mail: sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)


"Robert Morley" wrote in message
...
I'm surprised you're so emphatic about this, Sylvain. That's not like
you, from what I've seen.

I have to go with Baz on this one. Many, MANY people are moving away
from the .NET framework (Delphi seems to be a popular choice) because VS
2002/2003 were very slow, and while VS 2005 offers some improvements, I
gather, it's still often sluggish when using managed code, and many VB6
developers have no interest in learning C++ as the only unmanaged
alternative. And, of course, there's the nightmare of having to
redistribute the megalith that is the Framework itself.

As for how fast it will eventually be on upcoming OS's/hardware,
designing a system for stuff that's not out yet isn't usually the best
idea, as people have to use this stuff today on their current OS and
hardware, not a year or two (or more) from now. I'm also a firm believer
that the hardware shouldn't have to compensate for the underlying speed
of the application.

I completely disagree that VB6 with COM/DCOM/ActiveX would be a "black
hole". Most tests have shown that in fact, it's significantly faster
than .NET in most cases. There are certainly some tests where .NET
outperforms VB6, and it's a lot more capable in some areas like
multithreading, but most of the articles I've read have put VB6 as 1.5 -
2x faster than the equivalent .NET code.

But regardless of any of that, even if VS 2005 works faster in any given
scenario, Access is still VBA-based, and as such, you'd still be using
COM, etc. *If* you're going to use Access, which many people still
prefer to .NET solutions, it makes sense that you'd supplement it with
VB6/COM if necessary, rather than using .NET and having to go through
Interop.

I will agree that it looks like VB6 is likely to die eventually, and
unfortunately, Microsoft seems to have no understanding of why people are
complaining about that fact. An unmanaged version of VB with greater
backwards compatibility has been suggested, and requested by thousands
(http://classicvb.org/Petition/), but again, it seems unlikely.
Nevertheless, VB6 continues to be supported on Vista, at least in some
fashion, so I don't really see much of a problem continuing to use that
for the time being.

All that said, if .NET is fast enough for you (and as I say, I gather
2005 made improvements in that area), then certainly there's a lot to be
said for it in terms of enterprise development, Internet development,
etc. So, as they say, "if it works, don't knock it." For myself,
however, the sluggishness was intolerable, and at least so far, I'm
sticking with VB6 DLLs to back up my Access projects where necessary.


Rob

"Sylvain Lafontaine" sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)
wrote in message ...
Where you should start? Well, you should start with VB6, VC6,
COM/DCOM/MTS, ActiveX and the registries base themselves!

In case you forgot, this whole system was already in the process of
imploding under its own weigth 10 years ago. Doing a program today is no
longer the process of aligning a few text boxes, comboboxes and
listboxes on a simple form, tabbed form or continuous form on an
isolated machine, without internet and maybe even without a LAN.

Take a look at all the criticisms that were made about VB6, unmanaged
C++, the DLL hell, the total lack of security and the constant
corruption of the registries base - to name only that - and now think
about what would be the situation if instead of dumping that into the
garbage bin, MS would have increasing the size of these dinosaurs by a
factor of at least ten to one hundred. Increasing the size of the
registry base by a factor of at least one hundred is not only a
reasonable assumption but it's quite likely a gross under-estimation of
the true space that would have been required to cover the actual
possibilities of the .NET framework using these old technologies.

I agree with you that even on a Core 2 Duo, running the actual Framework
2.0 is slow but if you would have tried to do the same thing with
COM/DCOM/ActiveX - as it was with VB6 - probably that not only your
machine will be running slow but probably that it would have imploding
into a black hole.

Buying a dual core is now standard and they will soon be replaced with
quad core as the basic developer machine. (Probably that the price of
the quad core will be cut by two this autumn, if not before.). Next
year, you will start to see machines with 8 cores and from 16 to 32 Gigs
of memory running Vista 64 bit as the basic machine bought by most
developers. With such power running in 2008, do you really think that
people wanted to keep VB6/VC6 - with a few more gugus here and there -
as their main developer tools?

VB6 was the most popular tool in the past years? So do were DBase3,
Lotus 1-2-3 and Word Perfect. Now, all these tools are gone because
Ashton-Tate, Lotus and Word-Perfect Corporation were believing that
whence you have reached a market share of 90% and more, you don't have
to evolve anymore and your base of loyal users will remain with you for
eternity.

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC
E-mail: sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)


"Baz" wrote in message
...
Where do I start? How about the bloated, festering dotnet framework,
redolent as it is with the promise of versioning nightmares in years
ahead?
How about not being able to write unmanaged code in anything but C++?
How
about it being so damned slow? How about the IDE being so damned
awful?
How about MS's sheer, arrogant supidity in trying to kill the world's
most
popular development tool (I refer of course to VB6) without even
providing
backward compatibility?

That's a few gripes about the big stuff, I could think of a lot more if
I
tried. There's LOADS more stuff at the small level, my favourite in
2002/2003 was the godawful combo box which couldn't even do what a VB6
combo
could do, let alone an Access combo. Sure, you can build your own
controls,
which is exactly what I did to get a half-decent combo box (or you can
buy
'em if you didn't already think you'd wasted enough dosh on this
garbage),
but that's what you have to do all the time: so much of it doesn't
quite
work as you would expect or want that you spend all your damn time
finding/creating workarounds and alternatives.

Yeeeuk! I don't blame you for puffing this stuff - you've got a living
to
make - but frankly it makes me ill.

"Thomas" wrote in message
...
I still don't know the reasons you were not satisfied with VS/.NET
(except that with learning time)?


Regards,
Thomas

-----------------------------------------
NConstruct - Intelligent Software Factory
http://www.nconstruct.com
-----------------------------------------




Baz wrote:
Yep, that sounds like advertising. As I said, I own VS 2003
Professional
and I consider it to have been a complete waste of money. I do not
believe
that VS 2005 can be so much better that it is worth me spending any
time
on
it, and I'm certainly not going to waste any money buying add-ons
for
it.
I'd rather put my efforts into continuing my investigations into
Delphi
(not
that I see Delphi as a serious contender to Access either for
database
applications, it's just that, for the odd occasion when I do
something
for
which I don't consider Access suitable, I'd like to have a serious
and
current alternative to VB6).

"Thomas" wrote in message
...
Baz, you can use free VS 2005 Express and don't buy any 3rd party
component if you don't want, and you can still produce i.e.
continuous
forms with DataGridView component. This is not the best solution
but
either is not worse than Access (for which there is no free version
at
all).

IMO, a lot of 3rd party components *do* work very well - guys at
Developer Express, ComponentOne, Infragistic etc. really produce
very
usable products. Serious developer should at least try them before
judge
about their usability or quality. They are also very cheap
comparing to
the price of developing only few percent of their features. Maybe
it
sounds like advertising but I really just buy them and use them,
and I
want to share good experience with other developers.


Regards,
Thomas

-----------------------------------------
NConstruct - Intelligent Software Factory
http://www.nconstruct.com
-----------------------------------------




Baz wrote:
Well I haven't got VS 2005 and I'm not likely to get it either
(having
wasted a significant amount of my own money on upgrading from VS 6
to
VS
2002/2003, and then concluding that it sucked so badly that I was
simply
not
interested in using it).

Nor am I impressed by a product which requires me to buy
third-party
add-ons
in order for it to be anywhere near usable.


"Thomas" wrote in message
...
Baz wrote:
I have two things to say to you: linked subforms and continuous
forms.
Baz, I don't think this is an Access advantage. For example, look
at
those tutorials:


http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/to...taGridView.htm

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/N...idlesson1.html
It's fast to create (at least as fast as Access), it has more
features
than Access etc.

This is only one approach - it's similar to Access' one (I don't
like
any of them, though). If you need n-tiered application it's
better to
do
the dynamic grid creation. In both cases you can do it with VS
out of
the box or you can buy some 3rd party components.

--


Regards,
Thomas

-----------------------------------------
NConstruct - Intelligent Software Factory
http://www.nconstruct.com
-----------------------------------------

There is no doubt that in comparaison of VB6/VBA, you need a lot of firing
power inside your machine to tame .NET but this is precisely what we are in
the process of getting this year as the basic configuration for a new
machine.

As for a decent upgrading path from Access, this is probably something we
should see next year. The SSMA-Access is already written in .NET, so I
won't be surprised if in one year or two there is a new version to upgrade
not only the backend to SQL-Server but also the frontend to .NET (and of
course with the option of upgrading only the FE, without touching the BE).

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC
E-mail: sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)


"Robert Morley" wrote in message
...
Yeah, okay, for the type of issues you're talking about, I can see .NET
being more useful. Last time I tried it, though, it was unacceptably
slow, and until someone can prove to me that the speed is now more
acceptable--which I've heard for 2005--and that there's a decent upgrade
path from VB6 (or better yet Access)--which I've never heard from
anybody--it won't ever be on my list of things to upgrade to.



Rob

"Sylvain Lafontaine" sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)
wrote in message ...
Yeah, even me can get emphatic about something, sometime. It's only that
in this case (ADP), I got tired to hear people coming here to say that
even if they know nothing about SQL-Server, ADP or .NET - from their own
admission and they are proud of it, too - they will now tell us
everything we need to know about these.

As to VB6, I agree with you that on many occasions, it will be faster
than .NET. The problem here is not the performance when you are doing
old stuff like 10 years ago; the problem is when you want to have new
stuff. When was the last time that you have used some kind of datagrid
control with VB6 and that you didn't have the taste of eating your own
keyboard after a few days of work?

Something as simple as having rows of different colors can put VB6 or
Access down to their knees and I won't speak here about stuff like having
images or adding an unbound control to a continuous form or even
something very basic like keeping the multi-rows selection active when
the user click on a button.

When you need to add some extensibility of any kind, VB6/Access are
simply not the way to go.

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC
E-mail: sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)


"Robert Morley" wrote in message
...
I'm surprised you're so emphatic about this, Sylvain. That's not like
you, from what I've seen.

I have to go with Baz on this one. Many, MANY people are moving away
from the .NET framework (Delphi seems to be a popular choice) because VS
2002/2003 were very slow, and while VS 2005 offers some improvements, I
gather, it's still often sluggish when using managed code, and many VB6
developers have no interest in learning C++ as the only unmanaged
alternative. And, of course, there's the nightmare of having to
redistribute the megalith that is the Framework itself.

As for how fast it will eventually be on upcoming OS's/hardware,
designing a system for stuff that's not out yet isn't usually the best
idea, as people have to use this stuff today on their current OS and
hardware, not a year or two (or more) from now. I'm also a firm
believer that the hardware shouldn't have to compensate for the
underlying speed of the application.

I completely disagree that VB6 with COM/DCOM/ActiveX would be a "black
hole". Most tests have shown that in fact, it's significantly faster
than .NET in most cases. There are certainly some tests where .NET
outperforms VB6, and it's a lot more capable in some areas like
multithreading, but most of the articles I've read have put VB6 as 1.5 -
2x faster than the equivalent .NET code.

But regardless of any of that, even if VS 2005 works faster in any given
scenario, Access is still VBA-based, and as such, you'd still be using
COM, etc. *If* you're going to use Access, which many people still
prefer to .NET solutions, it makes sense that you'd supplement it with
VB6/COM if necessary, rather than using .NET and having to go through
Interop.

I will agree that it looks like VB6 is likely to die eventually, and
unfortunately, Microsoft seems to have no understanding of why people
are complaining about that fact. An unmanaged version of VB with
greater backwards compatibility has been suggested, and requested by
thousands (http://classicvb.org/Petition/), but again, it seems
unlikely. Nevertheless, VB6 continues to be supported on Vista, at least
in some fashion, so I don't really see much of a problem continuing to
use that for the time being.

All that said, if .NET is fast enough for you (and as I say, I gather
2005 made improvements in that area), then certainly there's a lot to be
said for it in terms of enterprise development, Internet development,
etc. So, as they say, "if it works, don't knock it." For myself,
however, the sluggishness was intolerable, and at least so far, I'm
sticking with VB6 DLLs to back up my Access projects where necessary.


Rob

"Sylvain Lafontaine" sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)
wrote in message ...
Where you should start? Well, you should start with VB6, VC6,
COM/DCOM/MTS, ActiveX and the registries base themselves!

In case you forgot, this whole system was already in the process of
imploding under its own weigth 10 years ago. Doing a program today is
no longer the process of aligning a few text boxes, comboboxes and
listboxes on a simple form, tabbed form or continuous form on an
isolated machine, without internet and maybe even without a LAN.

Take a look at all the criticisms that were made about VB6, unmanaged
C++, the DLL hell, the total lack of security and the constant
corruption of the registries base - to name only that - and now think
about what would be the situation if instead of dumping that into the
garbage bin, MS would have increasing the size of these dinosaurs by a
factor of at least ten to one hundred. Increasing the size of the
registry base by a factor of at least one hundred is not only a
reasonable assumption but it's quite likely a gross under-estimation of
the true space that would have been required to cover the actual
possibilities of the .NET framework using these old technologies.

I agree with you that even on a Core 2 Duo, running the actual
Framework 2.0 is slow but if you would have tried to do the same thing
with COM/DCOM/ActiveX - as it was with VB6 - probably that not only
your machine will be running slow but probably that it would have
imploding into a black hole.

Buying a dual core is now standard and they will soon be replaced with
quad core as the basic developer machine. (Probably that the price of
the quad core will be cut by two this autumn, if not before.). Next
year, you will start to see machines with 8 cores and from 16 to 32
Gigs of memory running Vista 64 bit as the basic machine bought by most
developers. With such power running in 2008, do you really think that
people wanted to keep VB6/VC6 - with a few more gugus here and there -
as their main developer tools?

VB6 was the most popular tool in the past years? So do were DBase3,
Lotus 1-2-3 and Word Perfect. Now, all these tools are gone because
Ashton-Tate, Lotus and Word-Perfect Corporation were believing that
whence you have reached a market share of 90% and more, you don't have
to evolve anymore and your base of loyal users will remain with you for
eternity.

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC
E-mail: sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)


"Baz" wrote in message
...
Where do I start? How about the bloated, festering dotnet framework,
redolent as it is with the promise of versioning nightmares in years
ahead?
How about not being able to write unmanaged code in anything but C++?
How
about it being so damned slow? How about the IDE being so damned
awful?
How about MS's sheer, arrogant supidity in trying to kill the world's
most
popular development tool (I refer of course to VB6) without even
providing
backward compatibility?

That's a few gripes about the big stuff, I could think of a lot more
if I
tried. There's LOADS more stuff at the small level, my favourite in
2002/2003 was the godawful combo box which couldn't even do what a VB6
combo
could do, let alone an Access combo. Sure, you can build your own
controls,
which is exactly what I did to get a half-decent combo box (or you can
buy
'em if you didn't already think you'd wasted enough dosh on this
garbage),
but that's what you have to do all the time: so much of it doesn't
quite
work as you would expect or want that you spend all your damn time
finding/creating workarounds and alternatives.

Yeeeuk! I don't blame you for puffing this stuff - you've got a
living to
make - but frankly it makes me ill.

"Thomas" wrote in message
...
I still don't know the reasons you were not satisfied with VS/.NET
(except that with learning time)?


Regards,
Thomas

-----------------------------------------
NConstruct - Intelligent Software Factory
http://www.nconstruct.com
-----------------------------------------




Baz wrote:
Yep, that sounds like advertising. As I said, I own VS 2003
Professional
and I consider it to have been a complete waste of money. I do not
believe
that VS 2005 can be so much better that it is worth me spending any
time
on
it, and I'm certainly not going to waste any money buying add-ons
for
it.
I'd rather put my efforts into continuing my investigations into
Delphi
(not
that I see Delphi as a serious contender to Access either for
database
applications, it's just that, for the odd occasion when I do
something
for
which I don't consider Access suitable, I'd like to have a serious
and
current alternative to VB6).

"Thomas" wrote in message
...
Baz, you can use free VS 2005 Express and don't buy any 3rd party
component if you don't want, and you can still produce i.e.
continuous
forms with DataGridView component. This is not the best solution
but
either is not worse than Access (for which there is no free
version at
all).

IMO, a lot of 3rd party components *do* work very well - guys at
Developer Express, ComponentOne, Infragistic etc. really produce
very
usable products. Serious developer should at least try them before
judge
about their usability or quality. They are also very cheap
comparing to
the price of developing only few percent of their features. Maybe
it
sounds like advertising but I really just buy them and use them,
and I
want to share good experience with other developers.


Regards,
Thomas

-----------------------------------------
NConstruct - Intelligent Software Factory
http://www.nconstruct.com
-----------------------------------------




Baz wrote:
Well I haven't got VS 2005 and I'm not likely to get it either
(having
wasted a significant amount of my own money on upgrading from VS
6 to
VS
2002/2003, and then concluding that it sucked so badly that I was
simply
not
interested in using it).

Nor am I impressed by a product which requires me to buy
third-party
add-ons
in order for it to be anywhere near usable.


"Thomas" wrote in message
...
Baz wrote:
I have two things to say to you: linked subforms and continuous
forms.
Baz, I don't think this is an Access advantage. For example,
look at
those tutorials:


http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/to...taGridView.htm

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/N...idlesson1.html
It's fast to create (at least as fast as Access), it has more
features
than Access etc.

This is only one approach - it's similar to Access' one (I don't
like
any of them, though). If you need n-tiered application it's
better to
do
the dynamic grid creation. In both cases you can do it with VS
out of
the box or you can buy some 3rd party components.

--


Regards,
Thomas

-----------------------------------------
NConstruct - Intelligent Software Factory
http://www.nconstruct.com
-----------------------------------------

Ummm...have you ever used the VB6 to VB.NET "Upgrade" Wizard? IIRC, it
doesn't upgrade forms at all, and it does a less-than-stellar job at
upgrading VB6 code. I can't say I have confidence in MS to write something
that will upgrade my FE in a way that would be better than simply starting
from scratch. (For me personally, my BE is already SQL Server, so that's
not an issue, though obviously that's strictly for me and not everybody.)


Rob

"Sylvain Lafontaine" sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)
wrote in message ...
There is no doubt that in comparaison of VB6/VBA, you need a lot of firing
power inside your machine to tame .NET but this is precisely what we are
in the process of getting this year as the basic configuration for a new
machine.

As for a decent upgrading path from Access, this is probably something we
should see next year. The SSMA-Access is already written in .NET, so I
won't be surprised if in one year or two there is a new version to upgrade
not only the backend to SQL-Server but also the frontend to .NET (and of
course with the option of upgrading only the FE, without touching the BE).

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC
E-mail: sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)


"Robert Morley" wrote in message
...
Yeah, okay, for the type of issues you're talking about, I can see .NET
being more useful. Last time I tried it, though, it was unacceptably
slow, and until someone can prove to me that the speed is now more
acceptable--which I've heard for 2005--and that there's a decent upgrade
path from VB6 (or better yet Access)--which I've never heard from
anybody--it won't ever be on my list of things to upgrade to.



Rob

"Sylvain Lafontaine" sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)
wrote in message ...
Yeah, even me can get emphatic about something, sometime. It's only
that in this case (ADP), I got tired to hear people coming here to say
that even if they know nothing about SQL-Server, ADP or .NET - from
their own admission and they are proud of it, too - they will now tell
us everything we need to know about these.

As to VB6, I agree with you that on many occasions, it will be faster
than .NET. The problem here is not the performance when you are doing
old stuff like 10 years ago; the problem is when you want to have new
stuff. When was the last time that you have used some kind of datagrid
control with VB6 and that you didn't have the taste of eating your own
keyboard after a few days of work?

Something as simple as having rows of different colors can put VB6 or
Access down to their knees and I won't speak here about stuff like
having images or adding an unbound control to a continuous form or even
something very basic like keeping the multi-rows selection active when
the user click on a button.

When you need to add some extensibility of any kind, VB6/Access are
simply not the way to go.

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC
E-mail: sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)


"Robert Morley" wrote in message
...
I'm surprised you're so emphatic about this, Sylvain. That's not like
you, from what I've seen.

I have to go with Baz on this one. Many, MANY people are moving away
from the .NET framework (Delphi seems to be a popular choice) because
VS 2002/2003 were very slow, and while VS 2005 offers some
improvements, I gather, it's still often sluggish when using managed
code, and many VB6 developers have no interest in learning C++ as the
only unmanaged alternative. And, of course, there's the nightmare of
having to redistribute the megalith that is the Framework itself.

As for how fast it will eventually be on upcoming OS's/hardware,
designing a system for stuff that's not out yet isn't usually the best
idea, as people have to use this stuff today on their current OS and
hardware, not a year or two (or more) from now. I'm also a firm
believer that the hardware shouldn't have to compensate for the
underlying speed of the application.

I completely disagree that VB6 with COM/DCOM/ActiveX would be a "black
hole". Most tests have shown that in fact, it's significantly faster
than .NET in most cases. There are certainly some tests where .NET
outperforms VB6, and it's a lot more capable in some areas like
multithreading, but most of the articles I've read have put VB6 as
1.5 - 2x faster than the equivalent .NET code.

But regardless of any of that, even if VS 2005 works faster in any
given scenario, Access is still VBA-based, and as such, you'd still be
using COM, etc. *If* you're going to use Access, which many people
still prefer to .NET solutions, it makes sense that you'd supplement it
with VB6/COM if necessary, rather than using .NET and having to go
through Interop.

I will agree that it looks like VB6 is likely to die eventually, and
unfortunately, Microsoft seems to have no understanding of why people
are complaining about that fact. An unmanaged version of VB with
greater backwards compatibility has been suggested, and requested by
thousands (http://classicvb.org/Petition/), but again, it seems
unlikely. Nevertheless, VB6 continues to be supported on Vista, at
least in some fashion, so I don't really see much of a problem
continuing to use that for the time being.

All that said, if .NET is fast enough for you (and as I say, I gather
2005 made improvements in that area), then certainly there's a lot to
be said for it in terms of enterprise development, Internet
development, etc. So, as they say, "if it works, don't knock it." For
myself, however, the sluggishness was intolerable, and at least so far,
I'm sticking with VB6 DLLs to back up my Access projects where
necessary.


Rob

"Sylvain Lafontaine" sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)
wrote in message ...
Where you should start? Well, you should start with VB6, VC6,
COM/DCOM/MTS, ActiveX and the registries base themselves!

In case you forgot, this whole system was already in the process of
imploding under its own weigth 10 years ago. Doing a program today is
no longer the process of aligning a few text boxes, comboboxes and
listboxes on a simple form, tabbed form or continuous form on an
isolated machine, without internet and maybe even without a LAN.

Take a look at all the criticisms that were made about VB6, unmanaged
C++, the DLL hell, the total lack of security and the constant
corruption of the registries base - to name only that - and now think
about what would be the situation if instead of dumping that into the
garbage bin, MS would have increasing the size of these dinosaurs by a
factor of at least ten to one hundred. Increasing the size of the
registry base by a factor of at least one hundred is not only a
reasonable assumption but it's quite likely a gross under-estimation
of the true space that would have been required to cover the actual
possibilities of the .NET framework using these old technologies.

I agree with you that even on a Core 2 Duo, running the actual
Framework 2.0 is slow but if you would have tried to do the same thing
with COM/DCOM/ActiveX - as it was with VB6 - probably that not only
your machine will be running slow but probably that it would have
imploding into a black hole.

Buying a dual core is now standard and they will soon be replaced with
quad core as the basic developer machine. (Probably that the price of
the quad core will be cut by two this autumn, if not before.). Next
year, you will start to see machines with 8 cores and from 16 to 32
Gigs of memory running Vista 64 bit as the basic machine bought by
most developers. With such power running in 2008, do you really think
that people wanted to keep VB6/VC6 - with a few more gugus here and
there - as their main developer tools?

VB6 was the most popular tool in the past years? So do were DBase3,
Lotus 1-2-3 and Word Perfect. Now, all these tools are gone because
Ashton-Tate, Lotus and Word-Perfect Corporation were believing that
whence you have reached a market share of 90% and more, you don't have
to evolve anymore and your base of loyal users will remain with you
for eternity.

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC
E-mail: sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)


"Baz" wrote in message
...
Where do I start? How about the bloated, festering dotnet framework,
redolent as it is with the promise of versioning nightmares in years
ahead?
How about not being able to write unmanaged code in anything but C++?
How
about it being so damned slow? How about the IDE being so damned
awful?
How about MS's sheer, arrogant supidity in trying to kill the world's
most
popular development tool (I refer of course to VB6) without even
providing
backward compatibility?

That's a few gripes about the big stuff, I could think of a lot more
if I
tried. There's LOADS more stuff at the small level, my favourite in
2002/2003 was the godawful combo box which couldn't even do what a
VB6 combo
could do, let alone an Access combo. Sure, you can build your own
controls,
which is exactly what I did to get a half-decent combo box (or you
can buy
'em if you didn't already think you'd wasted enough dosh on this
garbage),
but that's what you have to do all the time: so much of it doesn't
quite
work as you would expect or want that you spend all your damn time
finding/creating workarounds and alternatives.

Yeeeuk! I don't blame you for puffing this stuff - you've got a
living to
make - but frankly it makes me ill.

"Thomas" wrote in message
...
I still don't know the reasons you were not satisfied with VS/.NET
(except that with learning time)?


Regards,
Thomas

-----------------------------------------
NConstruct - Intelligent Software Factory
http://www.nconstruct.com
-----------------------------------------




Baz wrote:
Yep, that sounds like advertising. As I said, I own VS 2003
Professional
and I consider it to have been a complete waste of money. I do
not
believe
that VS 2005 can be so much better that it is worth me spending
any time
on
it, and I'm certainly not going to waste any money buying add-ons
for
it.
I'd rather put my efforts into continuing my investigations into
Delphi
(not
that I see Delphi as a serious contender to Access either for
database
applications, it's just that, for the odd occasion when I do
something
for
which I don't consider Access suitable, I'd like to have a serious
and
current alternative to VB6).

"Thomas" wrote in message
...
Baz, you can use free VS 2005 Express and don't buy any 3rd party
component if you don't want, and you can still produce i.e.
continuous
forms with DataGridView component. This is not the best solution
but
either is not worse than Access (for which there is no free
version at
all).

IMO, a lot of 3rd party components *do* work very well - guys at
Developer Express, ComponentOne, Infragistic etc. really produce
very
usable products. Serious developer should at least try them
before
judge
about their usability or quality. They are also very cheap
comparing to
the price of developing only few percent of their features. Maybe
it
sounds like advertising but I really just buy them and use them,
and I
want to share good experience with other developers.


Regards,
Thomas

-----------------------------------------
NConstruct - Intelligent Software Factory
http://www.nconstruct.com
-----------------------------------------




Baz wrote:
Well I haven't got VS 2005 and I'm not likely to get it either
(having
wasted a significant amount of my own money on upgrading from VS
6 to
VS
2002/2003, and then concluding that it sucked so badly that I
was
simply
not
interested in using it).

Nor am I impressed by a product which requires me to buy
third-party
add-ons
in order for it to be anywhere near usable.


"Thomas" wrote in message
...
Baz wrote:
I have two things to say to you: linked subforms and
continuous
forms.
Baz, I don't think this is an Access advantage. For example,
look at
those tutorials:


http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/to...taGridView.htm

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/N...idlesson1.html
It's fast to create (at least as fast as Access), it has more
features
than Access etc.

This is only one approach - it's similar to Access' one (I
don't like
any of them, though). If you need n-tiered application it's
better to
do
the dynamic grid creation. In both cases you can do it with VS
out of
the box or you can buy some 3rd party components.

--


Regards,
Thomas

-----------------------------------------
NConstruct - Intelligent Software Factory
http://www.nconstruct.com
-----------------------------------------

I must admit that there is a difference between an upgrade path and a decent
upgrade path. If I were the happy owner of MS, I would have put a little
more money into this upgrading wizard but as I'm not, ...

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC
E-mail: sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)


"Robert Morley" wrote in message
...
Ummm...have you ever used the VB6 to VB.NET "Upgrade" Wizard? IIRC, it
doesn't upgrade forms at all, and it does a less-than-stellar job at
upgrading VB6 code. I can't say I have confidence in MS to write
something that will upgrade my FE in a way that would be better than
simply starting from scratch. (For me personally, my BE is already SQL
Server, so that's not an issue, though obviously that's strictly for me
and not everybody.)


Rob

"Sylvain Lafontaine" sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)
wrote in message ...
There is no doubt that in comparaison of VB6/VBA, you need a lot of
firing power inside your machine to tame .NET but this is precisely what
we are in the process of getting this year as the basic configuration for
a new machine.

As for a decent upgrading path from Access, this is probably something we
should see next year. The SSMA-Access is already written in .NET, so I
won't be surprised if in one year or two there is a new version to
upgrade not only the backend to SQL-Server but also the frontend to .NET
(and of course with the option of upgrading only the FE, without touching
the BE).

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC
E-mail: sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)


"Robert Morley" wrote in message
...
Yeah, okay, for the type of issues you're talking about, I can see .NET
being more useful. Last time I tried it, though, it was unacceptably
slow, and until someone can prove to me that the speed is now more
acceptable--which I've heard for 2005--and that there's a decent upgrade
path from VB6 (or better yet Access)--which I've never heard from
anybody--it won't ever be on my list of things to upgrade to.



Rob

"Sylvain Lafontaine" sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)
wrote in message ...
Yeah, even me can get emphatic about something, sometime. It's only
that in this case (ADP), I got tired to hear people coming here to say
that even if they know nothing about SQL-Server, ADP or .NET - from
their own admission and they are proud of it, too - they will now tell
us everything we need to know about these.

As to VB6, I agree with you that on many occasions, it will be faster
than .NET. The problem here is not the performance when you are doing
old stuff like 10 years ago; the problem is when you want to have new
stuff. When was the last time that you have used some kind of datagrid
control with VB6 and that you didn't have the taste of eating your own
keyboard after a few days of work?

Something as simple as having rows of different colors can put VB6 or
Access down to their knees and I won't speak here about stuff like
having images or adding an unbound control to a continuous form or even
something very basic like keeping the multi-rows selection active when
the user click on a button.

When you need to add some extensibility of any kind, VB6/Access are
simply not the way to go.

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC
E-mail: sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)


"Robert Morley" wrote in message
...
I'm surprised you're so emphatic about this, Sylvain. That's not like
you, from what I've seen.

I have to go with Baz on this one. Many, MANY people are moving away
from the .NET framework (Delphi seems to be a popular choice) because
VS 2002/2003 were very slow, and while VS 2005 offers some
improvements, I gather, it's still often sluggish when using managed
code, and many VB6 developers have no interest in learning C++ as the
only unmanaged alternative. And, of course, there's the nightmare of
having to redistribute the megalith that is the Framework itself.

As for how fast it will eventually be on upcoming OS's/hardware,
designing a system for stuff that's not out yet isn't usually the best
idea, as people have to use this stuff today on their current OS and
hardware, not a year or two (or more) from now. I'm also a firm
believer that the hardware shouldn't have to compensate for the
underlying speed of the application.

I completely disagree that VB6 with COM/DCOM/ActiveX would be a "black
hole". Most tests have shown that in fact, it's significantly faster
than .NET in most cases. There are certainly some tests where .NET
outperforms VB6, and it's a lot more capable in some areas like
multithreading, but most of the articles I've read have put VB6 as
1.5 - 2x faster than the equivalent .NET code.

But regardless of any of that, even if VS 2005 works faster in any
given scenario, Access is still VBA-based, and as such, you'd still be
using COM, etc. *If* you're going to use Access, which many people
still prefer to .NET solutions, it makes sense that you'd supplement
it with VB6/COM if necessary, rather than using .NET and having to go
through Interop.

I will agree that it looks like VB6 is likely to die eventually, and
unfortunately, Microsoft seems to have no understanding of why people
are complaining about that fact. An unmanaged version of VB with
greater backwards compatibility has been suggested, and requested by
thousands (http://classicvb.org/Petition/), but again, it seems
unlikely. Nevertheless, VB6 continues to be supported on Vista, at
least in some fashion, so I don't really see much of a problem
continuing to use that for the time being.

All that said, if .NET is fast enough for you (and as I say, I gather
2005 made improvements in that area), then certainly there's a lot to
be said for it in terms of enterprise development, Internet
development, etc. So, as they say, "if it works, don't knock it."
For myself, however, the sluggishness was intolerable, and at least so
far, I'm sticking with VB6 DLLs to back up my Access projects where
necessary.


Rob

"Sylvain Lafontaine" sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam
please) wrote in message
...
Where you should start? Well, you should start with VB6, VC6,
COM/DCOM/MTS, ActiveX and the registries base themselves!

In case you forgot, this whole system was already in the process of
imploding under its own weigth 10 years ago. Doing a program today is
no longer the process of aligning a few text boxes, comboboxes and
listboxes on a simple form, tabbed form or continuous form on an
isolated machine, without internet and maybe even without a LAN.

Take a look at all the criticisms that were made about VB6, unmanaged
C++, the DLL hell, the total lack of security and the constant
corruption of the registries base - to name only that - and now think
about what would be the situation if instead of dumping that into the
garbage bin, MS would have increasing the size of these dinosaurs by
a factor of at least ten to one hundred. Increasing the size of the
registry base by a factor of at least one hundred is not only a
reasonable assumption but it's quite likely a gross under-estimation
of the true space that would have been required to cover the actual
possibilities of the .NET framework using these old technologies.

I agree with you that even on a Core 2 Duo, running the actual
Framework 2.0 is slow but if you would have tried to do the same
thing with COM/DCOM/ActiveX - as it was with VB6 - probably that not
only your machine will be running slow but probably that it would
have imploding into a black hole.

Buying a dual core is now standard and they will soon be replaced
with quad core as the basic developer machine. (Probably that the
price of the quad core will be cut by two this autumn, if not
before.). Next year, you will start to see machines with 8 cores and
from 16 to 32 Gigs of memory running Vista 64 bit as the basic
machine bought by most developers. With such power running in 2008,
do you really think that people wanted to keep VB6/VC6 - with a few
more gugus here and there - as their main developer tools?

VB6 was the most popular tool in the past years? So do were DBase3,
Lotus 1-2-3 and Word Perfect. Now, all these tools are gone because
Ashton-Tate, Lotus and Word-Perfect Corporation were believing that
whence you have reached a market share of 90% and more, you don't
have to evolve anymore and your base of loyal users will remain with
you for eternity.

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC
E-mail: sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)


"Baz" wrote in message
...
Where do I start? How about the bloated, festering dotnet
framework,
redolent as it is with the promise of versioning nightmares in years
ahead?
How about not being able to write unmanaged code in anything but
C++? How
about it being so damned slow? How about the IDE being so damned
awful?
How about MS's sheer, arrogant supidity in trying to kill the
world's most
popular development tool (I refer of course to VB6) without even
providing
backward compatibility?

That's a few gripes about the big stuff, I could think of a lot more
if I
tried. There's LOADS more stuff at the small level, my favourite in
2002/2003 was the godawful combo box which couldn't even do what a
VB6 combo
could do, let alone an Access combo. Sure, you can build your own
controls,
which is exactly what I did to get a half-decent combo box (or you
can buy
'em if you didn't already think you'd wasted enough dosh on this
garbage),
but that's what you have to do all the time: so much of it doesn't
quite
work as you would expect or want that you spend all your damn time
finding/creating workarounds and alternatives.

Yeeeuk! I don't blame you for puffing this stuff - you've got a
living to
make - but frankly it makes me ill.

"Thomas" wrote in message
...
I still don't know the reasons you were not satisfied with VS/.NET
(except that with learning time)?


Regards,
Thomas

-----------------------------------------
NConstruct - Intelligent Software Factory
http://www.nconstruct.com
-----------------------------------------




Baz wrote:
Yep, that sounds like advertising. As I said, I own VS 2003
Professional
and I consider it to have been a complete waste of money. I do
not
believe
that VS 2005 can be so much better that it is worth me spending
any time
on
it, and I'm certainly not going to waste any money buying add-ons
for
it.
I'd rather put my efforts into continuing my investigations into
Delphi
(not
that I see Delphi as a serious contender to Access either for
database
applications, it's just that, for the odd occasion when I do
something
for
which I don't consider Access suitable, I'd like to have a
serious and
current alternative to VB6).

"Thomas" wrote in message
...
Baz, you can use free VS 2005 Express and don't buy any 3rd
party
component if you don't want, and you can still produce i.e.
continuous
forms with DataGridView component. This is not the best solution
but
either is not worse than Access (for which there is no free
version at
all).

IMO, a lot of 3rd party components *do* work very well - guys at
Developer Express, ComponentOne, Infragistic etc. really produce
very
usable products. Serious developer should at least try them
before
judge
about their usability or quality. They are also very cheap
comparing to
the price of developing only few percent of their features.
Maybe it
sounds like advertising but I really just buy them and use them,
and I
want to share good experience with other developers.


Regards,
Thomas

-----------------------------------------
NConstruct - Intelligent Software Factory
http://www.nconstruct.com
-----------------------------------------




Baz wrote:
Well I haven't got VS 2005 and I'm not likely to get it either
(having
wasted a significant amount of my own money on upgrading from
VS 6 to
VS
2002/2003, and then concluding that it sucked so badly that I
was
simply
not
interested in using it).

Nor am I impressed by a product which requires me to buy
third-party
add-ons
in order for it to be anywhere near usable.


"Thomas" wrote in message
...
Baz wrote:
I have two things to say to you: linked subforms and
continuous
forms.
Baz, I don't think this is an Access advantage. For example,
look at
those tutorials:


http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/to...taGridView.htm

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/N...idlesson1.html
It's fast to create (at least as fast as Access), it has more
features
than Access etc.

This is only one approach - it's similar to Access' one (I
don't like
any of them, though). If you need n-tiered application it's
better to
do
the dynamic grid creation. In both cases you can do it with VS
out of
the box or you can buy some 3rd party components.

--


Regards,
Thomas

-----------------------------------------
NConstruct - Intelligent Software Factory
http://www.nconstruct.com
-----------------------------------------

Sylvain Lafontaine wrote:
I must admit that there is a difference between an upgrade path and a decent
upgrade path. If I were the happy owner of MS, I would have put a little
more money into this upgrading wizard but as I'm not, ...

There is a decent upgrade path from C to C#. MS put
a lot of time and effort into making sure that a VS C
project could be ported to VS.Net without tears.


I think it's like Vatican watching, or China watching as was. You see
the effects of the decisions that are made by some hidden process, and
then you get to work back from there and speculate about cause, and
speculate about possible future actions.