Conversion Project

[toddbailey]

Hello,

We are thinking about converting a fairly large Access application to Sql Server for data store and Visual Studio to develop the user interface.

Are any of the forms and code modules reusable or is this a complete rewrite?

put another way, can I import forms and code modules into VS with out a lot of effort or is this a major undertaking?

btw: over 250 forms, sub forms, reports and probably over 10,000 lines of code.

thanks

 

[spikepl]

Two parts in this.

Data store - that is not painless but manageable. Do that and when done (and the stuff is wokring) ask yourself why you'd want to mess with your familiar user interface.

Forms etc? This is a major undertaking. There are some conversion tools (google them) to create VB.NET stuff from an Access app. For a VB.NET person, not a problem. For someone only used to develop in Access, a not insignificant learning curve.

 

[Pat Hartman]

spikepl is correct. Unless you have mega-bucks to burn and a year of development time, you won't be able to even reproduce your Access application let alone improve it.

Most of the applications I develop use SQL Server or some other non-Jet/ACE back end database. The amount of trouble you will have converting to SQL server depends largely on the techniques you use to get data for your forms. With Jet/ACE it really doesn't matter if your queries limit the columns and rows selected, large chuncks of tables will still be transfered from the BE tables to memory on the FE computer where the joins are performed and queries are run. With a real server-side database, Access actually sends queries to the server and the server sends back ONLY the requested rows and columns. So, the biggest change will be modifying the forms to use queries with selection criteria that severely limit what is returned from the server at one time.

 

[toddbailey]

spikepl is correct. Unless you have mega-bucks to burn and a year of development time, you won't be able to even reproduce your Access application let alone improve it.

Actually, SS has powerful component called SSIS,

I was able to import the data and re direct the Access FE to use the SS de instead of the Access back end with a day and 1/2 of code development. It wasn't very well tuned but out of the box it was noticeably more responsive. Once triggers and stored procedures are written, the application should be vastly improved.

I've never tried to export an access form to VB 5 or 6, let alone VB/C#.net, but from what I gather it could be done, I'll have to do some more research on the subject.
The forms are originally Access 97 or earlier so not very pretty and use rather dated coding methods.

Right now we just want the best bang for the buck, so stage 1 would be to port the data to sql. The ui maybe a future project.