Satan was bargaining for Brad's soul. He showed Brad a vision of
himself on a beautiful sandy beach surrounded by gorgeous young ladies
carrying decorative icey beveredges to him. Brad said, "That's what I
have for all eternity if I give you my soul"? Satan said it was.
Brad took the deal.
He was instantly transported to Hell as we know of it; fire and
brimstone, heat and acrid smoke, no comfort and no water. Brad
screamed at Satan "That's not what you showed be"! Satan replied "Oh,
that was a beta version, this is the real thing".
I think I'll wait until at least SP1 before I get serious about using
it. The neat flexibility seems to come at the price of it looking
like Excel with a slightly enhanced interface. That "multiple value"
in a field (not a related table) is reminiscent of what one client
told me was their in-house implementation of Mumps in Access.
Microsoft has continually striven to make Access as easy to use as
Word or Excel. Thus far they've failed miserably and some of their
attempts such as Lookup Fields actually lead the uninitiated right
into the quicksand.
If you're a professional developer you'll have to go for it sooner or
later. New customers are coming on board every day and they'll have
the latest. I'm sure that applications delivered by truly
professional developers are still going to have normalized data and
tables in relationships and reports with some visible design.
As for the net centricity of it all, that's been a Microsoft trend
since Bill Gates belatedly awoke to the fact that the internet was
already important and would be ever more so. That's when he
reinvented MS as a "network" company.
On the whole I think I'm going to like most of it and just won't use
the bits I don't like or trust - just the same as now. Use the
ActiveX solutions if you must but if Ken Getz has provided a different
solution, that's the way I'll go.
HTH
