Week in Review

Week in Review: October 5, 2024

Highlights include the official release of the new modern chart feature, the release of Access 2024, and dynamically loading a DLL without registering it first.

Mike Wolfe

• 3 min read
Week in Review: October 5, 2024

Just Published

This section includes videos, articles, and (occasionally) open-source project updates from the past 7 days.

Articles

Videos‌

New to Me

This section includes content I discovered this week that has been around for awhile.

  • Nothing new this week.

Upcoming Access User Group Events

NOTE: Only English-language user group meetings with scheduled guest speakers or topics are listed. For a complete list of upcoming events, visit the Access User Group event calendar.

  • October 08, 2024: Juan Soto - Converting ADP Projects to ACCDB (JUST ADDED)
  • October 15, 2024; Juan Soto? - Access Beginner's Inaugural Meeting - (NOTE: Meeting is scheduled to start at 6 PM, but no time zone is specified; I assume it is US Central Time as Juan is based in Chicago)
  • October 17/18, 2024: Crystal Long and Kent Gorrell - Under the Hood of Database Relationships in Access and SQL Server (TOPIC/PRESENTERS UPDATED)
  • October 29, 2024: Maria Barnes - Integrate Monaco framework to improve SQL editor capabilities
  • November 06, 2024: Chris Arnold - An Image / Photo Cataloguer for Access
  • November 07, 2024: Greg Regan - Modern Access Interfaces
  • November 20 (9:30 am - 4:00 pm): In-person UK AUG Autumn 2024 Conference, Oxford University (Steve Girling, Anders Ebro, Mike Wolfe, Peter Bryant)
  • November 26, 2024: George Young- Using Web APIs in Access
  • December 04, 2024: Adrian Bell - topic to be confirmed
  • December 05, 2024: Crystal Long and Geoff Griffith- Creating Add-ins that run in Access and Office
  • January 8, 2025: Philipp Stiefel - topic to be confirmed
  • February 05, 2025: John Mallinson - Using VBE_Extras Add-In with Access
  • March 05, 2025: John Heaser - Source Control for Access & SQL Databases (JUST ADDED)
  • May 15, 2025 @ 9:30 am - 5:00 pm: In-person UKAUG 30th Anniversary Conference 2025, Imperial College London (Armen Stein, other speakers TBA)

Access Roadmap

The following changes were made to the roadmap between the last Week in Review (2024-09-28) and this one (2024-10-05).

  • Moved the "Access Modern Chart Improvements" feature from "In development" to "Launched"

The roadmap was last updated on October 4, 2024. The development priorities were last updated at the German-language AEK conference on October 14, 2023.

Listed below is a snapshot of the official Access Roadmap.

"In Development", "Rolling Out", and "Launched" are Microsoft terms that I pulled straight from the public roadmap.

"Development Priorities" do not appear on the Access Roadmap. Instead, they get updated from time to time in official Access blog posts or Access engineering team presentations. I'll include a link to the source of the current development priorities as they get updated.

Development Priorities

The items listed below reflect Microsoft's order of priority and were published in the following article, Microsoft's Plans for Access in the Next 6 Months.

The items are listed in priority order according to Principal Engineering Manager Dale Rector. The "Expected Benefit" of each feature is shown in italics after the description of the feature itself.

New priorities added since the previous set of priorities are shown in bold below. Dropped priorities are struck through.

  1. Continued Focus on Monthly Issue Fixes: (Monthly Issue Fix Blog) Improved product quality and reliability
  2. Access becomes Large Address Aware: Removal of key customer error issue
  3. Dataverse export improvements: Make it easier and faster for admins to migrate their data to Dataverse
  4. Large monitor support for forms: Improved support of Access on the latest hardware
  5. Modern Chart Improvements: Expanded support for the most popular chart types and options
  6. SQL Editor Improvements: Significantly improved SQL query editing experience
  7. Inconsistent Database Error Fix

Special thanks to Karl Donaubauer for posting the updated priorities at AccessForever.org.

In Development

  • SEP 2024: Integrate Monaco framework to improve SQL editor capabilities

Rolling Out

None.

Launched

UPDATE [2024-10-06]: Added missing word "Launched" in Access Roadmap changes section (thanks Xevi!)

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All original code samples by Mike Wolfe are licensed under CC BY 4.0