Access / DotNet hybrid: yes it's possible

[Tom van Stiphout]

I am really impressed with this new (to me) capability MSFT has built. Check
out this picture:
http://www.kittest.com/AccessInterop.jpg
That's an Access form on the left, with a textbox to type your name in. Then
you click the button, and with a few lines of code you're launching a DotNet
form (on the right) which is picking up the argument you passed in. Not
shown in the picture is that you can then raise an event in the DotNet form
(including arguments) and your Access application can be listening for it
(WithEvents). There is also a Session-like name/value pairs capability for
global variables.

When DotNet first came out MSFT had a "conversion kit" that supposedly could
take your VB applications and convert them to DotNet. It didn't work very
well, and was probably doomed from day one. This new capability makes a lot
of sense to me, because now you can migrate an application one form at a
time and take as much time as you want for the conversion, and build the
infrastructural pieces (e.g. data access, error handling) exactly like you
want, not how some tool decides you'll want it.

The Interop Forms Toolkit is here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=934de3c5-dc85-4065-9327-96801e57b81d&displaylang=en

It is positioned as a tool for VB6 apps, but as you can see it works for
Access as well. Not too surprising, since it is a COM-based solution.

-Tom.

[Rich P]

Interesting. This sounds like an upsizing tool to upsize stuff from an
Access application to the .Net platform. If this is a sort of upsizing
tool it would be quite handy for people (like myself) who have to
upsize/migrate Access projects (ADPs, mdb's) to the enterprise arena
(.Net). I have been doing this manually - almost like creating a .Net
application from scratch except that I have the Access project model to
follow. A tool like this could be a real time saver.

Rich

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[Bob Alston]

Somehow I missed the first message in the thread and cannot find it in
my newsgroup. Would you mind repeating the name of the tool you are
referencing?

Bob

[Rich P]

http://www.kittest.com/AccessInterop.jpg

-Tom.
<<

[Tom van Stiphout]

No, you got that wrong. It's not an upsizing tool, it's an interop tool
allowing a partial VB or Access application to run side-by-side to a partial
DotNet application, and to seamlessly communicate with each other. You have
to build the DotNet part yourself.

-Tom.

"Rich P" <rpn...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:471795e6$0$3576$815e...@news.qwest.net...

[Rich P]

I didn't think it was going to be that easy.