Visual Studio and Access

[mfaqueiroz]

Hello,

I don't have a lot of experience with access solutions.
I've finish all functions. Now I'm working in the better way to present the tool. I was thinking about connecting with visual studio. It is possible tu run all the code (vba) in Visual Studio? Do you think that i have strong vantages to do that?


Thanks in advance

 

[Ranman256]

No. Access VBE is all you need.
Everything can be done in Access.

 

[CJ_London]

just as Access is not a big Excel, Visual Studio is not a big Access.

Visual Studio uses VB (or other languages), not VBA. Construction of VB is similar to VBA but not the same so you cannot blindly copy entire modules. VB calls some functions by different names and same named functions can do different things and/or have different parameters and there will be VBA functions that do not exist in VB and vica versa.

Also in Visual Studio controls like combo's are initially presented at a much lower level of 'ready to go' - benefit is you can build in increased flexibility in what the combo can do - but at the expense of ease of use. Subforms and continuous forms are a foreign country to most GUI builders including Visual Studio - so you will need to build your own (which you can).

You could use Visual Studio to develop your front end instead of Access, advantage is you will be able to create a 'proper' executeable file so code is probably more secure and won't depend on user having access full version/runtime installed, but remember you will be trading ease of use for perhaps unnecessary complexity.

Access provides a Rapid Application Environment, Visual Studio does not - so allow significantly longer development times for VS - perhaps 10 times as much, certainly until you know what you are doing and have built up a library providing the equivalent of the standard functionality which comes with Access for what you need.

 

[stopher]

I'm a novice on VB(.net) but just ot add my own observations to what CJ_London has already said..
In Access you can be pretty much oblivious to the fact you are using classes. In VS (in my case VB.net) it's in your face. A good example is the humble string. In VBA its a simple data type. In VB.Net it is a class. It has properties like CHARS which returns a CHAR object which allows each character in the string to be directly referenced. There are many methods for the string class.

There's a bit more work in connecting to data sources. It's not so intuitive imho.

In Access/VBA graphics are very limited. In VS they are extensive. You can write your own games for example.

VS has more controls e.g. DataGrid control.

As a consequence of these and the points CJ_London made, the learning curve is much steeper and longer.

I would say if you are looking to market a database based product then VS (or other software development environment) is the way to go. But for use in your own network I can't think of a reason to justify VS.

 

[gemma-the-husky]

The main thing that I don't quite understand with non-access is exactly how the things we take for granted IN access are used within say VS.

In access, we can store a query, and then use that query as the basis for another query. We then bind the new query to our form.

for combo boxes on the form, we use another query.

It isn't at all obvious how the process of mapping these bindings to forms works in VS.

Also Access comes with rapid and elegant form and reports designers. You don't have these with native VS, so you either need to find a library to give you what you want, or do it all from scratch - I think.

It's all this sort of stuff that leads to the observations of CJ and Stopher. It's also why it probably helps being a proficient Access user before you even begin to investigate non Access solutions.

 

[AccessBlaster]

You really need both. Visual Studio for table creation and manipulation. Access for forms, reports. To tweak your tables like setting indexes and relationships, you need a program like Visual Studio to run on the server side.

 

[CJ_London]

To tweak your tables like setting indexes and relationships, you need a program like Visual Studio to run on the server side.

Why? If backend is Access, why not use Access, if backend is SQL server, use SQL Server Management Studio. If backend is MySQL, use Workbench or similar.

 

[Ranman256]

Access has a great RAD front end. It can hook to any of these BEs.
Build a user friendly FE with minimal coding, and do it fast.