Office XP Developer - MDE packaged?

[pat_nospam]

Okay, some of you have read my ongoing issue with Office 2003 Developer. Well, I went ahead and purchased Office XP Developer also, to alleviate those issues. It works like a charm, except the packaging wizard is slightly different than the Office 2003 packaging wizard.

Mainly, when the Office 2003 package was finished, it was an encapsulated program, unable to be opened by Full version access with the "left-shift-key" trick to look at the inner-workings. However, the Office XP Developer edition appears to simply zip up the MDE for distribution, allowing anyone with Access to simply hold the left-shift-key and take a peek at all the innards (minus the source code/MDE compiled components) of course.

Any insight into the difference, or is there an option to select within the XP Packaging Wizard to prevent this? I'll continue to play with it, but thought I would ask if anyone else had seen this.

TIA,

Pat

 

[pat_nospam]

BTW - in reading my question I realize I may not have made this point clear. I'm mainly interested in the difference between the two packages (2003 and XP), if need be, I'll simply disable the left-shift key with a password or alternate key combo.

I was just curious about the difference between the two packages and if anyone knew why they changed it.

Thanks again

Pat

 

[pat_nospam]

I was quite surprised too, except when I saw the XP package (since I had only worked on the 2003 version). The XP package puts the original MDE straight into the directory of your choosing -- whereas the 2003 version does not have anything resembling an MDE/MDB file (I just checked the files again searching for it).

The reason I left 2003 and reverted to XP was the digital certificate situation, so I wonder if they compile/convert the access file to an alternate format *shrugs* I'm not real sure. All I know is I will be password protecting the shift bypass key in XP because in 2003 it wasn't an issue.

I'm amazed by how odd 2003 Developer behaves from its predecessors.

I do not have either version but I have to say that I am quite surprised at what you say is the A2003 behaviour. Unless this is an option that you specified, I have never known ANY version of the packaging wizard to actually MODIFY an Access database and I'm really hoping that A2003 doesn't do it of its own accord either. It is not the place of the packaging wizard to modify your database. Its job is simply to gather everything needed to run your application together to make installations cleaner.