Chicago Access Users Group
– Meeting Notes for 1/27/2000The January CAUG meeting featured Microsoft’s Alan Halverson. His presentation was titled "Life as a Developer or How to Survive on Coke and Popcorn for 5 years".
Alan is a true Microsoft insider. He is a programmer who works primarily on the core Microsoft Access Component. That is, MSACCESS.EXE. The programming language used was Visual C++. Another primary tool used is SLM. This stands for "Source Library Manager" but is affectionately referred to as "SLIME". This is a DOS-based tool that has been around for a long time at Microsoft. It lets developers check in and out various software components as they work on them. Another key development tool is RAID. This is an ongoing database of known bugs.
Alan said that the development cycle for a product like Access is as follows:
Alan pointed out that testing is a constant process. He himself started out at Microsoft as a test engineer. When asked what makes a good tester he replied: "You have to have a fire in your belly to break things."
In Access 2000 Alan worked on the following items:
Conditional Formatting. This allows appearance of a form control to be predicated on definable conditions. i.e. If amount is negative, make background red.
Name Auto-Correct. This fixes common name reference problems when objects, fields, or controls are re-named. i.e. If you change the name of a field in a table it will automatically change the name in a form where that field is referenced. It also maintains a log of auto-correct changes.
Custom Groups / New Database Container Look. The database container is no longer restricted to the old Tables/Queries/Forms/Reports/Macros/Modules format. You can now create your own custom groups to combine related objects into a single view.
Subdatasheets. Simple parent/detail relationships can now be viewed in datasheet views.
Data Access Pages. Allows for easy creations of data-enabled web pages. These pages only work with Internet Explorer however.