Access and .net

  • Thread starter Thread starter Robert Blackwell
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Robert Blackwell

Does Access play well with vb.net and C#.

Currently access2000/XP use vb 6 don't they?
Anyways, I'm just curious really.
 
"Access" is really 2 (or 3) separate things. There's the Jet database (and
the MSDE), and then there's Access, which is essentially a RAD tool. When
you retrieve data from an MDB from outside of Access (eg. from VB or VB.Net
or C#), all you're doing is going through the Jet Engine to get at the data.
As far as I know, .Net works fine with Jet databases. (and, FWIW, Access
2000 and 2002 use VBA 6, not VB 6).
 
That's good to know, the only other way I've accessed access is through odbc
for some basic asp stuff.

What's the diff between VBA and VB?

VBA is like a "crippled" version or something?
 
You can't use ms-access to develop .net things,but you can certainly
*consume* .net services.

So, there is a SOAP add in, and this simply means that ms-access can consume
web services built using .net tools.

Check out:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/developer/webservices/toolkit.asp

Take a look at the above screen shots, they are quite cool. You can see that
it is quite easy to use .net services in ms-office now.
 
FWIW, I think of VBA and VB as being different dialects. Like American
English and English English -- just close enough to confuse the hell out of
you if you're not paying attention. <eg>

--
Rebecca Riordan, MVP

Designing Relational Database Systems
Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Programming Step by Step
Microsoft ADO.NET Step by Step

http://www.microsoft.com/mspress

Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves,
for they shall never cease to be amused...
 
Depends what you mean. I'm currently working on a .NET app that manipulates
data in a JET database (MDB) and my experience is that no, they do not play
well together at all. The problems I've encountered so far include ...

Field names that are OK in Access and JET cause conflicts in .NET.

The OleDbDataAdapter configuration wizard could not detect the fields that
make up the primary key when accessing a JET query based on a table with a
composite primary key. It could detect them when accessing the table
directly, but I was using aliases in the query to work around the problem
with the field names.

I could not use the Update method of an OleDbDataAdapter, as it seems unable
to translate between .NET and JET data types (e.g 1 instead of -1 for True).
I had to build up SQL statements in code, specifying the literal value -1
instead of True (with obvious negative implications for portability) and use
an OleDbCommand to execute them.

The app I'm working on is a relatively simple add-on to an existing Access
application, and converting the database to SQL Server or MSDE was not an
attractive option, as that would have required modifications to two existing
Access applications that use the same data. But if I was starting from
scratch on a new .NET application and a new database, I would definitely not
use JET.
 
I'm not sure to what extent I'll need to do this.

I guess I'll just have to post back and let you know my "success" story, if
it works out that is.
 
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