Time to Vent...
Microsoft Access is evil. It is the worst God-forsaken piece of shit ever perpetrated on enterprise customers in the history of mankind. It has held up migrations of Office suites in more places than I have days to count. The notion of bundling applications WITH databases is as stupid as riding a bicycle off a cliff. I fucking HATE that application. My teeth are clenched. This is not good. I must continue...
God****it - Access has wasted so much time of so many people's lives that will never be recouped. I can almost forgive IBM for OS/2 Warp, and Autodesk for R13, hell I can even forgive MS-DOS, but I cannot forgive Access. What a fetid turd of technological vacuousness. Is that even a real word? Vacuousness? Whatever. I made it up because thinking about Access pisses me off.
Is there any shortage of reiterated emphasis on "de-coupled" application logic on MSDN? On TechNet? On ANY programming site? Publish a rule and break it. Just as I blogged about with the Configuration Manager AD publishing guideline, but whatever, I need a glass of wine now...
Today makes at least two dozen situations, over the past 12 years, where a customer has to hold up everything because the dipshit department is arguing over upgrading their craphole Access "application" and who will pay for it (you know: "We think YOU should pay because YOU are forcing US to upgrade to 2010" versus "We think YOU should pay because YOU made a stupid garage-app piece of fucking shit mistake that WE are having to pay for in lost time and productivity") Wash - Rinse - and Repeat - AGAIN.
6 comments:
You're full of shit. If I spend a week programing an Access database that we use internally, and I can modify it to fit our needs without much cost or time, is a far better solution than going out and buying a program for several thousand dollars, then have to pay maintenance fees each year to keep it running. And if I have a problem have to wait for them to fix it, which could be days or weeks, or maybe never?
But you IT guys are happier, because we wasted all that money to buy it and then on maintenance fees - money that you could have used for server upgrades or some other tech items.
But WTF, you wanna buy my app for $50K, I'll sell it to ya - even though you could do it yourself!
Fair enough. Although you are taking this way too personal. To move this back to the middle, and give you props for the struggles you encounter from your end, I would suggest you read this as well: http://skatterbrainz.blogspot.com/2012/01/regional-autonomy-and-applications-in.html
I'm a 'pro'. I have the degree and the MCSD/PD. I have 20+ years of doing this. I do Projects for Clients. I charge the same rate for work on MSSQL, Oracle, Access or whatever. Access is shit. It's true. Forget the purists (although I am one) and their decoupling, their object orientation, remote debugging blah blah. MS Access is just a badly written program. And Access costs MORE than SQL + Visual Studio (because you can get them for free, fully licenced). It's just crap. Oh - I'm a big Microsoft fan. In love with C# MVC at the moment!
Cool! I'm a fan of anyone who still finds something exciting in the programming world that keeps them moving ahead. It's inspiring. It's funny how many people got upset with this post, thinking I was picking on Access itself as being a crappy product. It has its uses. Like every tool, there are some (limited) tasks for which it is ideally suited. However, the point I was trying to make was that when it spreads out into a large enterprise environment, it pins down the enterprise by its very nature to bind VBA and Forms/Reports to the base version. This creates a dilemma for IT departments trying to deploy a newer Office version, because now they depend on a shadow organization of "field developers", outside the purview of the IT department, to update their code. That brings along relative priorities, funding issues, schedule priorities, and so on. It usually ends up delaying Office upgrades for everyone considerably.
I agree with you, Access is putrid. At the moment I've practically gone mentally ill trying to import a spreadsheet for some retarded client who didn't want to start using SQL Server. Access keeps choking on the import and will not tell me why. It is easily the most aggravating product I have ever had to work with.
I'm in absolute agreement. Access is responsible for most of my grey hair. If I had ulcers it would probably be responsible for those also. Honestly, I love Excel (despite a few bugs I've run into) and consider it tough to beat. But Access frustrates me to no end, and while I'm on my soapbox, so does its cousin Word.
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