Access and Colors: MDBs, ACCDBs and the new Access Theme Colors

On my previous post, I spoke about how the new Access Theme Colors are very cool and all, but there's still the question as to how this relates to building solutions for 2003, XP, etc.

First, let me start by revealing a small bit of information I didn't mention last week: the Access Theme Colors are actually saved as negative numbers, much like the system colors. We actually use the next 20 negative numbers after the system colors.

What this means is that if you by any chance set a control to use any of these values in 2003, you will see it as black. Not very useful. So to make matters easy, we are not showing the Access Theme Colors for any MDBs. At first this might seem a little too drastic, but we want to make sure that you won't be able to do anything to an MDB that will render is broken in previous versions. So the Access Theme Colors will only light up in ACCDBs.