Access 2003 VBA Programmer's Reference

19.5. Summary

Access developers have started developing "real" applications using Microsoft Access. The Developer's Edition of previous versions of Microsoft Office has given Access developers permission to distribute the Access Runtime with their applications. This is no longer true with Microsoft Office 2003 because it does not offer a developer's version. Instead, the VSTO package includes these tools and the permission to distribute Runtimes.

But Microsoft has included much more than just permission to distribute the runtime in the VSTO. They created the Access Developers Extensions, specifically for Access developers who develop these "real" applications. All of these tools are intended to enhance our productivity and the professionalism of the applications.

With the ADE we can perform impact analysis using the Property Scanner. This can help justify level of effort for a change request. It can also improve our productivity and our ability to deliver well-tested solutions by helping us discover which objects must be changed to fulfill a request.

With the ADE we can also easily create a compiled database with custom startup properties using the Custom Startup Wizard. This helps save valuable time that was lost because the Startup properties got set on our only development database (that is, because we forgot to make a backup before we started changing the properties). And because we can save the settings from the wizard, we can consistently reproduce compiled databases with ...