Microsoft Access Team Blog : Access 14

Now accepting nominations for Access 2010 Technical Beta program

Clint Covington — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:16:00 GMT

I’m pleased to announce the Access team is taking nominations to participate in the Office 2010 Technical Beta program. We expect availability of our first beta release, known as Technical Preview, in the month of July. The team is excited to get feedback from our community that will help us make this a great release. Here is your opportunity to nominate yourself to participate in the program (space is limited). If you are interested in beta testing Access 14 please complete the following nomination form (you will need to log into Microsoft Connect with a Live ID).

We look forward to hearing from you.

P.S. Access MVP are already nominated and need not apply.

Updated July 13th, 2009: Nominations are now closed. Thanks for the great participation.

Make your voice heard

Clint Covington — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 04:55:39 GMT

The last couple of months we have been refining the Access 14 ribbons and working hard to polish features. One invaluable tool we have for making decisions is the Customer Experience Improvement Program. This database provides us anonymous statistics about stability problems and features you use most frequently. There are countless times through our release that product decisions are made based on the number of hits we have seen in a particular feature. The data gives us a pretty good idea what people are doing in the product. Here are examples of the type of information we use regularly:

What types of files (mdb, adp, accdb, mde, etc) people are opening;
How many and what type of objects are in the database;
If a database started from a template;
Each click on the ribbon, context menu, office button;
Types of link tables in an application; and
Macro design usage.

What does it mean to you? If you want your voice heard—signup for the program. You can enroll by clicking on the Office Button | Access Options. Click on the Trust Center tab and then the Trust Center Settings button.

Last step is to sign up for the program by making sure the fourth check box is selected.

This is your opportunity to vote every day with every click and every file open about what in the product is important to you. Please take a few minutes to sign up and start sending us your feedback.

Thanks in advance!

Access dev kitchen recap

Clint Covington — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 05:57:26 GMT

Few months ago went fishing for people to come to Microsoft and participate in the Access 14 developers kitchen. The event was a great hit—we had people come from all over including Germany, United Kingdom, South Africa, Puerto Rico, and US. People spent 4 days with us learning about our 14 plans and providing feedback—some has already made it into the latest builds. Steven Thomas recently conducted a short interview with me about the event.

Thanks Steven.

Free Access 14 IW Workshop @ Microsoft

Clint Covington — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:32:29 GMT

Recently, over 30 professional Access developers had a sneak peak at Access 14 during Access 14 Developer Kitchen. The event provided valuable insight to the Access team and resulted in some useful changes. Next is to gather feedback from Access business users who are not professional/expert developers.

The team is holding an Access IW (Information Worker) Workshop on the Redmond, WA campus in February (exact date TBD). This two-day conference and usability study is for Information Workers (especially in non-IT roles) that use Access to track information. This is an opportunity for these important Access power users to share with us feedback about the product before the Beta release.

What is IW Workshop?

This workshop is designed for a small number of invited guests to spend two days with the Access team. Throughout the event, team members will outline the vision, demonstrate the product and answer questions. Participants will have many opportunities to build applications using Access 14 and provide feedback through 1:1 interaction with the people who designed it.

What is in it for me?

All participants will get the chance to learn more about how to build Access applications and to influence the next version of Access. You will also have a chance to connect 1:1 with members of the product team. Additionally, you will receive a “Thank You” gift from Microsoft.

Who is invited?

Seating is limited. Invitations will be extended to applicants that most closely map to the following skills:

Create new applications or modify existing templates
Create new tables, relationships, queries, reports, form and macros
Write useful expressions
Write macros and dabble in code

Apply Today!

The workshop is FREE. Participants are responsible for travel and expenses. For more information or to confirm your seat, please send us mail with your name, contact information, title and role in your organization, and description of Access experience.

Feedback about Access 2007 Performance

Clint Covington — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 05:54:23 GMT

I want to thank everyone who participated in our last thread on backwards compatibility. There is lots of great discussion about how the decisions we make will impact your business. Folks are reading it and digesting the feedback. Again, thanks.

Recently, I came across a great article that compares Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 performance by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes on ZDNet. He put the three operating systems through a series of real-world tests to find out which one was fastest. Adrian picked 23 straight-forward tests. The first five tests were:

Install OS - Time it takes to install the OS
Boot up - Average boot time to usable desktop
Shut down - Average shut down time
Move 100MB files - Move 100MB of JPEG files from one hard drive to another
Move 2.5GB files - Move 2.5GB of mixed size files (ranging from 1MB to 100MB) from one hard drive to another

Adrian gave each operating system a 1, 2, or 3 based on which one was fastest. The Windows 7 Beta placed first in nearly every test--kudos to the Windows 7 team.

How does this relate to Access? Good question…

What scenarios would you pick for a similar test for Access 14 ? Are there scenarios where Access feels slower than you would expect?

Are there areas where Access 2007 is slower than Access 2003? We have fixed a few performance issues in SP1 with more coming in SP2; however, the team still wants to make sure our performance efforts are getting the most bang for the buck. If you have a repro case where 2007 is slower than 2003, send us email. Our performance team would love to take a look.

BTW – I’m pinged daily about Access 14 Beta 1. In December we ran a developer kitchen for 30+ Access pro devs who came to Redmond, used the latest build for 4 days, and gave us feedback. The team is now busy incorporating their feedback and getting ready for Beta 1. The Beta 1 date hasn’t been announced yet so I can’t talk about it. If you are interested in participating in the Beta keep an eye on this blog--more information is coming about how to get involved.

Feedback about cross version compatibility

Clint Covington — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 05:17:43 GMT

Greg Lindhorst (Program Manager on the team) is looking for customer feedback on the impact of some new features on cross version scenarios. Love to get some feedback from the community about a few questions we have:

How important is it that previous versions of Access can RUN applications (launch forms, change data values) written in a newer version of Access?
How important is it that previous versions of Access can EDIT applications (modify forms, change data schema) written in a newer version of Access?

Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Help make Access 14 better - Send us your most used forms!

Clint Covington — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:02:00 GMT

The Access team is looking to make improvements to the form design experience by helping users get started building powerful and interesting forms. Most Access professionals have a set of forms that they re-use quite a bit. What we are interested in specifically is how these common forms are laid out. There are obviously re-used patterns that you are using in terms of how you layout controls to provide your customers with a compelling experience; we’d love to see examples of them. Ask yourself the question,

“If the Access team provided me with 5 super easy ways to lay my controls out nicely on a form, what would those 5 forms look like?”

If this question brings a picture to your mind of one or more form that would be helpful to you, send it to us! Your feedback will help make the next version very cool.

What naming conventions do you use?

Clint Covington — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:45:12 GMT

We are looking at ways to make our templates better starting points for developers. Some common developer feedback we get about the templates and Northwind in general has been to use naming conventions. For forms and code there seems to be three good options:

There was a less information about conventions for database schema. Here are some resources that jumped out at me:

One of the challenges of naming conventions is providing useful documentation that makes app development easier while not burdening developers with extraneous verbosity.

So tell me, what naming conventions do you use? Do you have your own style for table and field naming conventions? If we built our templates following a more comprehensive convention would it make you more likely to use them as starting points?

Do you reuse expressions, forms and reports?

Clint Covington — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 04:11:24 GMT

We are looking at ways to make developers more productive in the next release.

Tell me about how you create expressions. Do you keep a library of common expressions or look through previous work for examples? Are you super smart and always create them from memory/scratch?

What about forms and report templates? Do you always end up starting from scratch or are there common patterns you find yourself reusing commonly? Do you have a database of common forms and reports that acts as a repository?

Would it be interesting to find and share expressions, forms, and reports with the community of Access developers? Can you give me examples of content you would share if facilities were available?

Thanks in advance!

Tell us how you organize code snippets

Clint Covington — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 03:44:00 GMT

Many of the Access developers I have meet have a system for organizing code snippets. You know, the common fragments of code that are reuse for project after project. We are interested in learning more about readers of this blog organize code that is useful from one project to another. Do you store the fragments in text files, html files, database tables with meta data?

Please tell us more!

Calling all Access book authors

Clint Covington — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:01:11 GMT

One thing I have learned over the years of shipping Access is that book authors turn out to be some of the best sources of feedback on our future plans and a steady stream of bugs. Last release Jeff Conrad, John Viescas, Roger Jennings, and Martin Reid pelted me with constant feedback about things that needed to be fixed and/or changed. The economic incentive combined with the tight deadlines lead authors into the product much earlier than most other developers. As part of our internal effort to ensure we are building the right product, the team plans on communicate under NDA some of the next version plans to partners, developers, and authors. The goal is to gather feedback that will make the next release even better.

I'm looking to compile a list of people that have written about Access in the past and are interested in writing about Access 14. If this fits you, use the email link to send us your name, previous books, and email address. We will contact you with more details about how to get involved.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

VBA in Office 14

Clint Covington — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:27:00 GMT

A few readers have recently expressed concern and anxiety about an article published by The Register. Particularly,

“VBA will disappear completely when Office 2007 for Windows is replaced, sometime around 2009.”

As someone who is working everyday on Office 14, I can assure you that VBA is not disappearing in the next release of Office. VBA will continue to be a valuable option for developers to customize Office solutions to meet their business requirements. I can’t talk more about Office 14 but we are doing our best to make it a great release for developers.

Clint Covington
Lead Program Manager, Office

Access in Chicago

Zac Woodall — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 23:18:00 GMT

One of my Access PM compatriots, Steve Greenberg, asked if I would share this with you folks:

Hello,

My name is Steven Greenberg and I’m a Program Manager on the Microsoft Access team. I’ve been at Microsoft for seven years, and I transitioned over to the Access team earlier this year. I’ve spent this year learning everything I can about Access, and writing specifications for our next version. I’m incredibly excited about the work we’re doing. I can’t wait to be able to talk about it publicly on this blog and in other venues.

But for the moment, I’ve got a quick request:

During the holiday season, the frenetic pace of development here at Microsoft slows down a bit. People tend to take the opportunity to use up spare vacation days that expire at the end of the year, and many members of our engineering travel home to visit their families.

This can make it challenging to keep the development schedule moving forward, but it also means that it’s a good time for the folks who are here to step back a bit and talk to some customers.

In this spirit, I’ll be traveling with Clint Covington and Kenneth Shaw (two other team members) to the Midwestern U.S. in a few weeks. We’ve already got two visits set up with Fortune 500 companies. We will be talking about our plans for the next version of Microsoft Access and asking for our customers’ direct and candid feedback.

We have some time from 9:00am to 4:00pm in Chicago on December 18^th that we’d like to fill up with a visit to a third customer. We’re actively looking for someone in the Chicago area who would like to meet with us. We’d be excited to visit you at your place of work, whether you work alone, in a company of 100,000 people or in any situation in between.

We’re particularly interested in hearing about your experiences with Access 2007 and/or SharePoint. Because we’ll be talking about our plans for the next version of Access, we’ll ask you to sign an NDA.

So if you’re in the Chicago area and are interested in some face time with the product team, we’d love to meet you. We probably only have time to meet with one person face to face, but if we can’t visit you in person, we’d be happy to set up a phone call or a Live Meeting after we get back.

If you'd be interested, please send me an e-mail (stevegr@microsoft.com), and we’ll get in touch!

Meet The Access Team at the 2008 Office DevCon in San Jose

Zac Woodall — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 06:37:00 GMT

Some members of the Access team are going to be attending the 2008 Office Developer Conference being held in San Jose, CA from Feb 10-13. It will still be pretty early for us to be talking about the next version so most of the content will be 2007 focused, but for those who like to walk the bleeding edge of tech, we definitely plan to talk some about our Access 14 plans as well.

This is a great opportunity for you to meet up with members of the product team in an informal environment where you'll have the opportunity to give us your direct candid feedback about the product. We'd love to see you there!!

Do you sell and Access application?

Clint Covington — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:01:00 GMT

The Microsoft Access team is evaluating opportunities to help application developers and consultants grow their businesses and enable an even broader distribution of custom Access applications. If you have an Access application that you sell, tell us about it. Please leave a comment or send email with the following information:

What is the application scenario and why people use your application(s)? Application description (or URL).
How do customers/clients find your application(s) to purchase?
What features could we add to Access that would help you be more successful?
Contact information (via the email option).