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I'm a Java EE developer and was just contacted by someone who wants me to put a quote together for an application for his business that can integrate with their MS Access "backend".
I was hoping to post this and just get a general high-level overview of best practices involved with MS Access Programming. I assume the program would be entirely in VB, but didn't know if I would have the option of writing something in VB.NET or (preferably) C#.
Also, I despise the presentation layer: any good GUI-builders for Access applications?
What are some common tools and APIs (unit test frameworks, build automation systems, etc.) that MS Access programmers frequently use?
Any links or resources you would recommend?
It sounds like a pretty simple application: take inputted data, compare it to some tables, and throw some output to the screen. I'm a pretty decent programmer so even though I've never done an Access program before it couldn't be too difficult for me to pick up.
Thanks for any thoughts or suggestions!
Access as a front-end
Well, people feel strongly about Access. The main reason for the negative view is that it is widely used by non developers who have no concept of proper database development and end-up with these barely working, horribly designed applications that bring dread into the heart of developers.
Having said that, Access is nothing more than a Rapid Application Development tool with a very low barrier of entry.
The good and the bad
Access is a fairly old product line, spanning almost 20 years. A lot of people's objections to Access as a technology are grounded in its early history: since backward compatibility is something that Microsoft deems important, Access has retained most of its features, good or bad, over the years.
You can see the choice of VBA, non-winform forms, promotion of modules over OOP, to be bad choices, but the continuity of these early-on design decisions have made Access a stable platform to build on.
VBA: is the language that never dies. It's clunky, outdated, lacks recent advances in languages, but it's also fast, simple to learn, flexible, easy to interop with (for instance calling Win32 APIs is really simple), and it can be interfaced with external libraries (event written in .Net).
Bound forms: by default Access makes it easy to create working applications without a line of code. Most queries can also be created without having to go down to SQL at all. If you're a control freak, it can be annoying, but it's easy to drop down to code and control everything from there.
Third-party integration: even though there are lots of add-ons to Access, I wouldn't recommend using most of the user-controls or third-party libraries unless you really have to. They can be very hard to deploy in environment with limited user rights and versioning can become hairy.
Ribbon: it may be good or bad, depending on who you talk to, but Microsoft has invested a lot into it and it'll probably be there for a while. At least the Ribbon and the improved controls in Access 2007 and later make applications look and behave in a modern way. Gone the horrible UIs of old, you can now do really pretty things with themes, HTML layouts and a modern ribbon.
Reliability
Most of the objections, especially about reliability, are simply no longer true.
A carefully designed Access Application can support dozens of concurrent users. I have a decent-size application managing Procurement/Stock/Quality/Parts/Projects for a manufacturing company that has 150 users, of which usually 50 are connected at any given time. I haven't had any corruption in years.
Of course, you must always bear in mind that Access is a multi-user file-based database, so you cannot expect it to work without risk in environments with unreliable or slow networks, and connecting to a an Access backend through WiFi is really asking for trouble, just like you wouldn't work on large Excel file over wireless either.
Maintenance is part of the lifecycle of an application. Preventive maintenance is extremely important.
Don't wait for something to go wrong: build some admin tools within your app that will help check the state of your data (make sure everything is coherent, detect invalid user inputs, etc).
Also compact the database regularly (I do it nightly after I make a backup as part of the daily automated tasks on the backend server).
Some random tips
Make sure your front-end and back-end are split: only data should be on the backend, and the front end should be installed on each user's machine.
From your front-end, open a permanent link to a dummy table on the database back-end: keeping an always-on connection will greatly improve performance. For the reason why, have a look at this question.
The backend should be in a shallow network share (don't put it deep under multiple directories).
Make sure you think hard about how you will deploy your updates to all clients automatically.
There are many ways to do this. I developed my own but you could use ClickOnce or Tony Toews's Auto-Front-End Updater
Use the Runtime: your front-end application can run without users meddling with its internals if you deploy the Access Runtime on their machine. It's free too.
Don't fight the tool: Access has a certain way of doing things. Just use the tools available without going to code until you have exhausted the capabilities of the RAD environment. You may be surprised by how much you can achieve without any code at all.
Nothing stops you from using OOP: defining classes and binding your classes manually to your forms, controlling data updates, etc. The default behaviour in Access tends to encourage quick-development and is fine for small projects, but if you suspect that your project might grow, plan for the future, just like you would with any other framework.
Access as a backend database
Now, if you want to use a front-end written in something else, say C#, it's fairly easy to use Jet/ACE drivers to connect to an Access back-end database.
Jet is the older driver for Access and only supports .mdb files. 32 bits drivers are installed by default in Windows (still there in Win8) and can always be relied upon.
ACE is the new .accdb format used by Access2007/2010/2013. It has increased limits and enhancements over the older version but it can still talk to an .mdb.
You will have to install the Microsoft Database Engine on all the clients (not necessary if either a full version or the Runtime of Access 2007/2010/2013 is already installed though).
Don't try to use 64bit versions of Access/ACE driver. It's the future but it introduces many new issues, especially if you are using 3rd-party libraries or some of your clients have 32bit Office installed (your can't mix and match 32bit and 64 bit office components).
Similarly, don't build your C++/C#/Java/Python front-end app in 64bit mode and expect the 32 bit ACE driver to work. Keep everything in 32 bit, make things work, then test 64 bits versions if you really need to.
Do always keep at least a single connection open to the back-end database from your code, as mentioned above.
Ideally, try to abstract any Access-specific code to make it easier later in case you need to switch to a server-based database. You could use an ORM that can talk to different back-ends transparently, or you could at least separate your SQL queries into resource files or separate objects that can be easily replaced later.
Depending on the load (mostly how much data need to be changed in the DB), an Access back-end can easily accommodate between 20-100 users without issues. Things will deteriorate if there are lots of insert and updates occurring all the time. There are lots of tricks that can be used to make things better and make Access scale well, but you are inherently limited by the type of application your are building and how users are accessing its data.
I am very curious about what you think is the best approach for people that want to start webdevelopment. I'm now talking about people that finished their education and so want to start from scratch.
I still have questions like:
Where do you start?
What software gets involved in webdevelopment?
What tools / setup would you recommend?
Offcourse i'm interested to hear alot more then only the answers to those three questions.
I am not writing this to get a load of people react on my post, i am trully interested in knowing how much work and money it will cost a webdeveloper when starting from scratch.
I hope to get a clear view on how to approach and to maybe hear some best practices.
Well one thing's for sure, education isn't finished! There's a whole lot to learn, and the more we learn the more we seem to need to learn.
If you're really starting from having no programming background whatsoever then I think you'd be advised to take a staged approach. For example:
1). A web page with a few different text formats and pictures and colours. Here you're just learning HTML. For that any browser and a notepad editor would do, but probably a tool such as Eclipse that gives some HTML editing capability would help.
2). More adaptive HTML - stylesheets that let you change appearance without changing all the html. So that's CSS.
3). Using the above, improve your designs. There are loads of formatting tricks good web sites use and you'll need to learn those.
Note that by now we've done a lot of study and we have not actually written any programs!
4). Dynamic web pages. Now we move to the programming side, rather than just writing some HTML files write a program that delivers the HTML and in some way changes the content. Starting with something really simple such as including "today's date is ..." on the page. For that You would need to pick a server development technology such as Ruby/Rails or PHP or Java/JSP ... You'll get a lot of different advise about "best" for this.
5). Now you can start to work on accepting input from the user and doing something with it so that useful work gets done. Things such as databases start to become important.
There's a whole load more after that, JavaScript and so on. An experienced programmer can pick up this kind of stuff quite quickly, if you've never done any programming at all then you will need to be prepared to take a while before you can get to the level you probably target. I think the key is to acknowledge that a great commercial web site reflects a lot of collective wisdom and skill picked up over many years, and probably is the result of a multi-disciplinary team working together. For one person to match that is a big ask. For one person to produce something nice and useful is more practical, but still does need a lot of different skills. It's quite reasonable to specilaise in a subset of the skills. For example, good visual designers write little or no code but are highly valuable.
you need:
a browser, eg. FireFox, Internet Explorer. A webdeveloper toolbar might also be useful.
a webserver, eg. Apache, Tomcat, IIS
a programming environment, eg. Php or ASP.NET
a development tool, eg. Notepad, Notepad++, Visual Studio .NET, Eclipse
most of the times a database, eg. SQL Server, mySQL
I'd say it depends what you want them to master: the technologies only (up to which skill level ?) or the whole software engineering behind a web project
A sample and fast technologies learning tree could be:
1) HTML
2) CSS
3) HTTP
4) Server side programming (PHP ?): programming concepts, interacting with HTML/CSS, then PHP API
5) Databases (start simply with MySQL for instance) + SQL (CRUD with Joins, Subselect, Indexes, Views and Transactions)
6) Client side programming (JavaScript first then Ajax)
7) A web framework (ZEND ? cake ?) and a good IDE (lots of...)
Full-time learning those technologies requires at least 1.5 year , based on the experience I have with my students and people must be trained mainly on concrete projects.
Then people should learn software engineering (cf link text) covering at least
- software requirements
- software design
- software construction
- software testing
I think people can have useful experience in this software engineering tree in 1 year and can (should) combine learning technologies with learning software engineering.
For training someone from scratch (technologies + software engineering) I'd say a least 2 years if working on at least three 6-month projects
This answer is Microsoft specific.
For starters you'll need an editor, a (optional) database and a few starting points.
Microsoft supplies most of these for free: you can download the Visual Studio Webdeveloper 2008 Express Edition for free, this includes most of the stuff you'll need.
If you plan on developing database driven websites, and who isn't, you might want to use the free SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
When you have the tools setup it's time to download some samples and see see how they work. Again Microsoft supplies some for free. You can check out tutorials and samples at their Asp.Net site.
When you are ready for some more advanced stuff, check out ASP.NET MVC, again at Microsoft.
With these tools and examples you should be able to get started.
I just want to add that you will most likely also need Photoshop or other tool to create the graphics for your web sites.
In spite of java/.net/php,the HTML,CSS,JavaScript are the basic web development toolkit.
Get a job as a junior developer that will put you on a project that is developing a web application. I personally think it should involve one of the two most established platforms, Java or .Net. I know some will disagree, but these are good foundations to branch into other tech platforms later.
Make sure you open an IDE (e.g. Visual Studio or Eclipse) everyday and code something. If not, find a new job immediately.
Read religiously at night. Start with "Code Complete", then move on to other books.
Learn the fundamental technologies of the World Wide Web:
HTTP
HTML
CSS
JavaScript
DNS, URL's
Good luck and happy travels!!
you need:
a google chrome . This provide you some advantage like inspect option. A webdeveloper toolbar might also be useful.
2. Html, Css, JavaScript are the basic language that you should be know
a programming environment, eg. Php or ASP.NET is needed for storing data and making login type page
a Visual Code Studio is needed for coding. This provide you emmet facilities that suggest you while you are coding
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I know that some people swear against using a language-specific IDE ever (vim/emacs or die! type stuff) and that some people are really uncomfortable with coding/compiling in the terminal at all, so my question has the following parts.
When do you switch from one to the other
Is it even necessary to know both? If not, which should you know?
Lightweight or Heavyweight IDEs? (just code highlighting or every feature you could imagine)
What IDE do you recommend in general, and why?
Feel free to answer all, some, or none.
Short summary so far:
IDEs
Big Projects
GUIs
Easy Version Control Integration?
Text Editors
Quick/Small projects
Adapts to other languages more easily
Less overhead
IDE usage is very subjective to personal opinion. With that disclaimer, here's mine.
Know your tools and know your platforms. Developing software is your domain, so be good at it.
When do you switch? When your knowledge tells your intuition that it would be easier with the other tool.
Should you know both? I would argue that you should know everything about working with your platform. Low level knowledge makes higher level applications easier to understand.
Lightweight or heavyweight depends on the task at hand. Both are appropriate at times.
I can't recommend any one IDE, it depends on your application's platform(s) and what you, the developer, are comfortable with. If you're doing .NET, Visual Studio on Windows is probably the best, but that doesn't mean you can throw out Notepad. For Java on Linux, Eclipse is great, but don't discard vim.
Hey, Front Page is probably the right tool for the job to some people (ouch, yes, I said it. /me ducks).
As several other people have said, which IDE you use or if you use one at all is heavily dependent on the language your developing in, the scale of the project, and the platform your working on. Although I've never encamped with either the Vi or Emacs guys I do use a number of other editing tools in roughly this language breakdown:
C#, or anything else .Net: Visual Studio. There is no serious competition, the CLR languages beg for syntax highlighting, refactoring, and advanced file management. Thankfully Microsoft got this one right and the Express editions are an incredible value.
C++: I haven't touched it in a while, but I would typically view the code in Visual Studio, but compile through batch files, which had a lot to do with the eccentricities of the particular embedded platform I was working on.
Python: I recommend Stani's Python Editor if you need something with bells and whistles, but Python is so direct in its structure that I usually end up just using Scite. It does everything you really need in a Python editor.
SQL: Notepad++ or, if your doing heavy lifting, any supported editor + SQL Prompt.
Java: I hear good things about Eclipse, but Java is evil so I don't touch it.
PHP, Perl, Javascript, BASH, or most other languages: Notepad++ on Windows, Scite on Linux.
Although switching between all these IDEs can be troublesome, especially when a feature you love in one is missing from another, the benefits are to be found in using the best balanced tool for the job your doing. I switch IDEs all the time as my needs vary and I would encourage others to as well. Having worked on a limited number of projects, of limited scale, on particular platforms I hardly know all the use cases and I'm sure there are plenty of other situations and code editors out there that pair up in unique and wonderfully functional ways.
Personally, I almost never use an IDE. I use vim/make almost exclusively. There's lots of benefits to this:
Totally language agnostic. Once some commands and shortcuts are memorized, they work with all of my projects
Parts are easy to swap in and out. If I want to switch compilers, I change the variable in my makefile.
"configuration agnostic". No matter how the settings are, I can develop. No GUI? No problem. Different desktop environments? No problem. There are even ports of vim to Windows. I develop on my local machine and when I'm ssh-ed into a server in the same manner.
There are also some downsides:
Vim is hard to learn. I'm not even going to lie about this. It takes time to acquire some power.
Mostly limited to *NIX. Yeah, there are things like cygwin. Yeah, there are ports of Vim to Windows. It's somehow not exactly the same.
It's possible that if I learned an IDE that focused on a specific language, it'd have some features that would be pretty powerful for that language.
I usually use the IDE only for debugging (which IDE depends on the language/platform), and use my personal editor for the actual editing of code.
I feel that using one editor for everything is a much better approach than relearning key-bindings for every language/platform change I make.
In my experience, if the project involves building a GUI, an IDE is an invaluable tool.
If it's small, "gut-level", or a web service, I'd go exclusively text editor.
My rule of thumb is that if the language and IDE are tied together, then use the IDE (see anything using MS project files). Otherwise any editor will do. Personally I like visual Slickedit, or notepad++ if the company isn't going to shell out for slickedit. On the linux side I use Emacs, which you can consider a heavyweight editor, or a lightweight OS.
While I use VIM and non-IDE type tools, I have to admit that Visual Studio (especially 2005/2008) is possibly one of the best programs ever written. The intelli-sense and debugging tools are well worth there weight in gold. I find myself being able to write code very fast. It is especially helpful in cases where you are utilizing frameworks (e.g. .NET) and need that little extra guide to tell you what functions are available off an object without having to refer to the help documentation. It is hard to beat auto-code formatting, bookmarking, immersive debugging, refactoring, source control integration, and plug-in support.
For everything else, I use VIM. I have to admit I'm still learning how to use VIM well, but I already know it is powerful. It truly is a matter of choosing the right tool for the job.
EDIT: One thing I will mention is that you pick a tool or two and learn it very well. Become an expert at it. Learn the ins/outs and explore the nitty gritty secret stuff your editor/IDE can do. The more you do this, it will matter less what the tool is.
For me the break-down is by technology.
I use Notepad++ or vim for anything in the LAMP stack - I've never found anything particularly useful in the IDEs for those technologies (unless you could the MySQL Client Tools as an IDE, which I use when I am able to).
When working in the WISC (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, C#) stack, on the other hand, I use an IDE - one of the Visual Studio products depending on which project I'm working on.
A lot of this probably has to do with the sorts of projects I work on. I work in PHP in the LAMP stack, so I don't have to handle bunches of external libraries the way I probably would if I was using perl, and the projects I develop on LAMP are usually simpler than my Windows development. In .Net, on the other hand, navigating the libraries can be quite difficult without the IDE, and the debugging can (I find) be more complicated. Plus when developing web services using SOAP, I wouldn't even want to think about doing it without the tools Microsoft supplies.
I find that IDEs for C and Python don't buy you much, at least the ones that are available for Linux. So, when I write C and Python code, I will usually use GVIM + Ctags + standalone debugger + make.
However, in the case of Java, Eclipse offers a Java programmer so much that it's hard not use it and after a while become spoiled to the extent that it's just too painful to go back to writing Java code in VIM.
Strangely enough, I haven't had the same experience when using Visual Studio for C projects (even though I do find its debugger indispensable). One reason for this is that I prefer to manage the build scripts myself. Even with Eclipse, I would still use ant so that I know exactly what is happening during each build. Admittedly, you can of course look at the build configurations in both Visual Studio and Eclipse, but this just isn't as direct as seeing the exact command used. That being said, I'm still forced to use Visual Studio for builds mainly because of convention, as there other people working on these projects, but I will still edit the code in GVIM (with the help of ctags).
The ONLY time when you have to do compile/link using the commandline is when you work on a pure Linux server with no GUI installed - in this case your ONLY REAL OPTION is emacs. (Using anything else is pure masochism).
At all other times it would be sheer stupidity not to use a mature IDE.
Your Questions:
When do you switch from one to the other
(answered above)
Is it even necessary to know both? If not, which should you know?
That will depend on how keen you are on being a programmer AS WELL AS a systems administrator. The latter is called upon to support the former and to implement whatever is necessary to keep all systems running smoothly. To know both can NEVER be harmful, but if you insist on being a programmer only, then the necessity of knowing a specific IDE for the platform you choose is obvious.
Lightweight or Heavyweight IDEs? (just code highlighting or every feature you could imagine)
I assume the choice here refer to programmer only: there is no doubt that the more assistence your programming tool/environment can give you, and the more support you can get that allows you to focus on implementing your program spec. the better. So YES: HEAVYWEIGHT is the only sensible choice.
What IDE do you recommend in general, and why?
On a Windows platform this question is moot: whatever Mictrosoft recommends (and if you have the $$$). On Linux you have several choices: GTK-based (Gnome & company), QT-based (KDE & company), (if you're a sucker for punishment you can go for pure X and then you are more-or-less in for an interesting time) both Gnome and KDE have IDE's you can use. Third party IDE's, like eclipse, are available; they all enable you to develop GUI-applications that will run in whatever the user chooses as his GUI-environment. Some of these IDE's even allows a multiplicity of programming languages (that is the glory of Linux and FOSS: you have choices; you are not pinned to the "geography", not led to the slaughter, ...).
My personal choice of IDE (C++ only) is Ultimate++. It is source compatible with both Windows and Linux. The IDE is approaching a rich maturity AND it offers 'everything-plus' that other C++-IDE's are aspiring to. (I know this is a plug, but I've got good reason: give it a try.)
HTH
I've done both, but the debugger is really a great tool to have.
You can get pretty far just adding debug output and rebuilding, and that even forces you to use your noodle and the scientific method a bit more, but in the end (imo) the debugger just cannot be denied... it lets you really get in there and explore the system during runtime.
There are opportunities for both specialization and generality. In my own work, I've found that flexibility and being able to ride a steep learning curve has paid off well.
I use an IDE whenever I'm using a language that's more suited to being written by a computer than by a human being, for example Java. It's far too verbose to write by hand without loads of auto-completion. Vim's auto-complete is never quite as good as a language-specific IDE.
For less wordy languages though, you can't beat a good Vim- or Emacs-like editor for churning out plaintext quickly.
If the project exceeds two or three source files, I tend to use an IDE.
Once you've used an IDE with good (vs6 was not good, and most generic text editor's support for this is crude at best) intellisense-style prompting and auto-complete for a few weeks, you won't go back.
I use vim for everything except Objective-C stuff, which I use xCode for. The Interface builder, error checking, debugging are quite valuable.
However, I use a InputManager to let me use vim commands/key bindings in xCode, so I never really leave vim for anything ;)
I do all my coding in SciTE, my favorite editor, lightweight, with good syntax highlighting, and with shortcuts I am familiar with (or which I coded!).
Now, doing lot of Java at work, I also use Eclipse, which greatly improve with each version. I appreciate it is quite customizable, and very flexible about coding help, but I still do most of my editing in SciTE... Fortunately, the auto-detection/update of files edited elsewhere works quite well in Eclipse (although sometime with a sensible delay to analyze the reloaded class: we have big projects and not that much memory (1GB)).
I appreciate Eclipse mainly for two things (we compile with a special ant process and we don't really do refactoring): quick navigation in the project, particularly find a class and call hierarchy, and of course debugging.
I don't think these are so much distinct worlds, these are just tools, quite complementary: I won't fire Eclipse to do a quick edit of a small HTML file, I can't debug in SciTE. So I use both.
I haven't used an IDE since the last time I created a native GUI app, lo those many years ago. And, even then, I pretty much just used the IDE to create the GUI forms and my own editor for the actual code once I figured out how to plug an alternate editor into the IDE.
I'm not a "give me vim, or give me death!" fanatic, but my experience with having used IDEs and having used a bunch of xterms running vim has left me with the impression that the only thing IDEs really contribute, for me, is drag-n-drop form editing, which is something I don't need, given how long it's been since I last did anything with a non-web-based GUI.
re: when? I use Eclipse for Java and debugging. I keep jEdit open with a variety of Groovy scripts available. I also use Cygwin's bash in 3 shell windows for executing Ant tasks, searching etc. I can use Bash aliases for some truly powerful stuff with respect to running our server and client.
re: both? Yes, it is vital to know both IDE and non-IDE development. It doesn't matter which IDE but a debugger is essential.
re: which? For Java, Eclipse if you are paying (free) and Idea if someone else is ;-) Actually, I prefer Eclipse but I think that Idea has better support for Groovy so that it is attractive to me.
A decent code highlighting editor is all I use.
I use IDE for debugging, or for every big project that require to go on many different file. Lot of IDE have quick click to move from one class to an other. IDE for that is more productive. I use IDE too when I use big FrameWork that has a lot of folder and file, more easy to manage.
Update because question has been updated
When do you switch from one to the other?
I switch for small change in CSS or other small task,
Is it even necessary to know both? If not, which should you know?
Some time when building form (example in C#) it's very much profitable to use the IDE. Samething for debugging with breakpoint. I think both are required.
Lightweight or Heavyweight IDEs? (just code highlighting or every feature you could imagine)
Code hightlight is fine for small job, but when you have big stuff to do, bigger IDE with autocomplete, real-time error check and other refactoring tool is necessary to be more productive.
What IDE do you recommend in general, and why?
Visual Studio is great for .net, Eclipse for Java.