Wrox - Expert Access 2007 Programming

Introduction

The largest release of Access in five years, Access 2007 includes many new features that you can leverage both in your own development work and as application features that you can pass along to your users. This book discusses new features such as developing for the Ribbon and the Attachment control, as well as new ways of looking at old problems such as automation, debugging, and deployment. It aims to fill the gaps between casual Access development and professional Access development. We wrote this book as a tribute to the product that we’ve come to use every day. It represents a labor of love for the years that we have spent working with Access both at Microsoft and prior to joining Microsoft.

Building Off-the-Shelf Applications

Throughout this book, we discuss several topics that contribute to off-the-shelf quality. Off-the-shelf is a term used to describe software that is typically available for release to the public. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the software is available commercially (although it could). Even departmental or larger scale internal applications can benefit from features such as configuration (discussed in Chapter 12), and deployment (discussed in Chapter 14). We live in a global marketplace. If you are developing databases for use by people in locales other than your own, you might be particularly interested in Chapter 12, where we will also discuss localization.

Forms are essential to most Access applications. Forms are used for everything from displaying and validating data, to splash screens, to About dialog boxes. You will learn about creating different types of forms such as these in Chapter 8. It doesn’t stop there, however. You will also learn about how to create custom navigation solutions for forms to provide intuitive experiences for your users. In many solutions, seeing an error message from Access is less than desirable so you will also learn how to suppress Access error messages to provide your own. We also discuss using Form events to validate data; detect when records are added, updated, or deleted; and much, much more.