Chris

Clint -

I just wanted to thank you publicly for taking the time to answer my query. Those links were helpful, too.

Also, I've just returned from Office DevCon 2009 here in Australia and have to say I was impressed by the way Access is heading.

The guys from Redmond were great & our confidence is restored! Yeah, the ribbon's a pain from a developer's perspective but there are ways around it and lots of great features in Access 2010 that we could utilize to have a very slick commercial product.

Thanks for the offer of direct contact - will take you up on it.

Cheers,

Chris

Couldn't agree more with Brice It - thanks for taking the trouble to be so specific (perhaps a little TOO explicit, but it's understandable!)

We are an ISV stuck in Access 2003 because 2007 was such a pain. The ribbon concept being one problem (but there are others) - as an ISV we want to hide anything other than our GUI.

Clint - are we on the wrong track here? Should we be moving away from Access for our application (mainly small-business CRM - up to about 10 users mostly). We need a front-end DB as well as a back-end & Access has served us well. VB.net would not give us what we want & we're keen to use 2010 if suitable.

Here's my question - are MS really standing behind Access for development of commercial apps or is the focus now just for internal SME use? We're about to spend a squillion dollars on the next release. We really need to know if we're on the right track. Please be honest - should we quit now and move platforms?

Appreciate your time...

Rgds,

Chris.