I would like to share some thoughts on MS Access as a development environment… About 2 years ago I worked for a company that developing applications in Access was how things were done. Now don’t get me wrong, I think Access has its advantages. Come on we all need something to keep track of our CD/DVD collections right? 

I went to that company with experience in vb.net and C++, and a degree in Software Applications and Programming, so I was not a newbie in the desktop application development world. But never the less, my boss thought Access could do everything.  On one occasion we had someone come in and give us some project requirements. It had to be a suite of 3 applications that interact with each other with one database behind them. Also it would be common that the database would have 10-20 million records. Now I have designed some databases in Access and when you reach around 1 million records things get a bit slow. During the meeting I brought up the idea of developing in .NET with a SQL Server Backend. I felt I was about to be fired when he screamed back in disgust. Well the client decided to go with us anyway (I have no idea why). And I was told to get going on developing it in Access. Well when I left I was just about complete building the first of three applications and it was a huge mess.  The thing was slow and clunky, yet my boss could not figure out how to speed it up. 

In the end I worked 12 and 14 hour days trying to make Access do something it was not designed to do. When I took the job I just wanted something to get development lifecycle experience, but in the end found that there are people in the development world that hang onto tradition way to long and need to try something new.