Access's Commitment to Developers
There has been a series of questions on the Access blog and in the newsgroups about Access’s future as a tool for developers. Although it is WAY too early to nail down what we will do in the future, I can share a bit about how we think of Access going forward and our longer-term goals for the product. Access has become the most broadly used database in the world because of 5 key strengths: it is easy to author and allows users to get to a running solution quickly, it combines the power of a real relational database, rich forms & reports and code for developers, it creates single-file solutions that are easy to manage, and it has rich connectivity to existing data. All of these strengths will continue to be important in the future. In addition, we believe that the ability to build rich client / rich server apps will become increasingly important going forward, as customers increasingly seek workgroup solutions that work over the web.
You could think of Access 12 as focused on two big areas; first becoming much easier to use and faster to create a useful solution, and second, on creating an interesting new class of applications on Windows SharePoint Services. The ease of use and time-to-solution work is really related, and we worked hard to achieve this by making the features easier rather than dumbing them down. Access’s designers are all 10+ years old (I mean the tools in the product, but come to think of it, all the people working on Access are also 10+ years old), and the technological changes over that time have allowed us to do stuff we couldn’t have dreamed of back in the early 90s. Direct manipulation, live data at design time and many of the other features in Access 12 would simply have been too slow back in the day, but they work great on today’s machines and modern Windows. In addition, Access 12 blazes new ground to enable applications with both rich and reach clients against SharePoint that were super hard to build before. We think there is a big opportunity here, both in terms of the type of applications that can be built, and the ease with which IT can manage those apps. We believe this work is useful for all of our users- developers, end-users, and IT folks; but we also believe there is a lot of other work that remains to be done in the future.
Access aims to provide three things for developers going forward:
- Better experience & more power in Access – Access 12 makes it much easier to build many forms & reports, but there are still lots of useful apps that are hard to build. One example that has come up a few times is building calendars – although building a data form in Access is now way easier, building a calendar continues to be quite hard. We agree, and over time, you’ll see us continue to innovate in the UI to both make it easier to do things, and possible to do more types of things. We love RAD!
- Better experience working with servers – Access 12 starts down the path of enabling applications with both rich client and rich server interfaces built on SharePoint, and you can expect that we’ll continue in this direction as we move forward. Ray Ozzie and Bill’s memos about service-based applications highlight how important this is to the company. And of course Access will continue to work closely with the SQL Server team to ensure that Access client / SQL backend applications work great as well.
- Easier to extend Access apps with Visual Studio – despite our best efforts, Access will not offer all the power of Visual Studio, and for some tasks developers will want to use VS. We believe a key part of the strategy needs to be to make it easy for VS developers to extend Access apps without having to re-write them. Office 12 does this to some extent (e.g. workflows written in the SharePoint Designer can be easily edited in VS), but there is clearly more to do here.
We continue to believe in Access as a development tool in a big way. We think that in the coming versions Access will continue to get faster and more powerful to develop in, that it will enable new types of applications, that you will be able to extend your apps to new types of servers, and that it will be possible to extend Access apps with Visual Studio when needed. We’ve made progress toward these goals in Access 12, and believe that Access 12 is the biggest improvement we’ve made to the product in memory. We also believe that there’s a long way to go and a ton of interesting work to come in future versions. We’d like you to come along, and take advantage of Access 12 and beyond to build some killer apps.