Access 2003 VBA Programmer's Reference

Chapter 19. Using the ADE Tools

Access Developer Extensions (ADE) is a set of great tools for the serious, and possibly not-so-serious, Access application developer. The ADE package includes tools that enhance your ability to design, develop, and deploy Access-based applications.

The ADE package includes a tool designed to improve your application development capabilities: the Property Scanner. The Property Scanner makes it easy to search collections, objects, and properties of a database for the occurrence of a particular term or value right from the Access user interface. This add-in allows you to target searches precisely and to save the search criteria for future use. This tool makes it easier to perform impact analysis, which means you can provide a better estimate of effort for change requests as well as develop a better strategy to test the application if change requests are approved.

The ADE package also includes the Custom StartupWizard. Have you ever been locked out of a database because you set startup properties to lock the user out of changing the application but forgot to make a backup so you could get back in to change the application yourself? Or, maybe you have written code to control the startup so you didn't accidentally lock yourself out. No matter which route you took, you've had some overhead during application development. The Custom StartupWizard can be used to quickly define startup properties for your application. The startup properties are used to compile ...