Bellevue, WA 2013 Access Day Presenters
Thursday, November 21, 2013
Armen Stein
ACCESS TIPS AND TRICKS
Armen will present tips and tricks for making your Access applications more robust and easier for your users. Topics covered will include navigation techniques, database design ideas and UI improvements. Example code will be available to attendees.
Armen Stein is the founder and president of J Street Technology, a Microsoft Partner located near Seattle. J Street is a team of developers with expertise in custom Access desktop and ASP.NET web applications. Armen is a Microsoft Certified Professional and an Access MVP, and has spoken at many user groups and conferences, including Microsoft TechEd, Office DevCon in Australia, the PAUG Conference, and the UK Access User Group in London. Armen is co-author of Access 2007 VBA Programmer’s Reference (Wrox). His other interests include travel, photography, backgammon, movies, and driving his 1969 Ford Bronco in the sun.
George Hepworth
George will demonstrate an Access 2013 web app he has built for an actual paying customer – a pet sitting business. The House Calls database started as an Access app in the late 90s. The business owner wanted to extend the database to the web to provide employees and customers with the ability to use it with any browser. George will demonstrate the app he built using Access 2013 and Office 365, including key features and the security considerations for segregating client data.
George Hepworth began his Access career by creating tools to track sales and exam results for his business that created and sold training and exam materials. Realizing that Access databases were more interesting and rewarding than writing training materials, he soon transitioned to full-time Access development. He started his company, Grover Park Consulting, (www.GPCData.com) specializing in resuscitating “owner-built” Access databases for small and medium sized organizations. Being self-taught, George believes that any day on which he doesn’t learn at least one new thing is a day wasted.
George is a database developer creating Access and Access/SQL Server solutions for clients in the Puget Sound region. George is part of the administrator team, and a regular contributor, at Utter Access, the most popular Access support site on the Internet. He is the author or contributor to several books on Access, and a presenter at the Pacific Northwest Access Developer Group and Seattle Access Group.
George holds a BS in English and an MA in TESL from Utah State University.
Tom van Stiphout
HANDLING ODBC ERRORS FOR MERE MORTALS
When you develop Access client applications with a SQL Server back-end you will run into error messages from ODBC. Some of them are cryptic even to developers, let alone end users. They are also notoriously difficult to handle. For bound forms the Form_Error event gives very little information. For unbound scenarios the Errors collection is better, but you are still stuck with cryptic messages. In this talk we will present an integrated way to deal with ODBC errors: how to intercept them and how to transform them into user-friendly messages. The details are interesting and somewhat complex, but abstracted away for those developers who just want to get things done. 2 lines of code is all that it takes.
Tom is the software development manager for Kinetik I.T., a premier provider of Website Design, SEO Internet Marketing, Software Development and Computer Network Services & Solutions in Phoenix, AZ. Tom is an occasional speaker and contributor to books on Access and SQL Server. In the cooler months he likes hiking and biking, and pinot noir throughout the year.
Andrew Couch
DEPLOY AND EXTEND ACCESS WEB APPS
This talk will focus on demonstrating how to extend the features of your Access web app in the cloud. Andy will start by looking at how you can exploit the document storage facilities of Office 365, and show how you can use Excel PowerPivot to create rich presentations. Then Andy will show how to convert an Access report to run in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) connected to the web app back-end database in Windows SQL Azure. Finally he will show how Visual Studio 2013 can help deliver extensions to your Access web app.
Andrew Couch has been working with Microsoft Access since 1992 as a developer, trainer and consultant. He is a joint founder of the UK Access User Group which has been running for over 13 years and has been a Microsoft Access MVP for the past 6 years.
Andrew has been involved with Access web app’s from an early point in time and has been working with members of the Microsoft team to communicate information on exploiting the power of this new technology.
Publications with Microsoft Press include Microsoft® Access® 2013 Plain & Simple and Microsoft® Access® 2010 VBA Programming INSIDE OUT and he is a co-author on Microsoft® Office Professional 2013 Step by Step. Andrew also authored Extend Microsoft Access Applications to the Cloud Using Web Apps and Office 365.
In addition to consulting and regularly speaking at community events, Andrew has developed the Migration Upsizing SQL Tool (MUST) that allows users to easily convert Access Databases to SQL Server by using an Access-based application. Due to the success of MUST, which is used by over 200 companies, SQL Translation capabilities and WebForm code generators for .NET were added to the product range. He also provides free technical articles for Access.
Luke Chung
USING SQL SERVER AND AZURE WITH MICROSOFT ACCESS
Luke Chung will share his experiences in upsizing Microsoft Access databases to SQL Server and using the Microsoft SQL Azure cloud service to host a database that can be used over the Internet. Advantages, disadvantages and other differences will be discussed.
Luke Chung is the president and founder of FMS, the world’s leading developer of commercial products for Microsoft Access with 12 products for users, developers, and system administrators. Located near Washington DC, FMS is celebrating its 27th year in business with tens of thousands of customers in over 100 countries. Luke supported Access since its debut, is a Microsoft MVP, and Access developer. He’s the lead author behind products such as Total Access Analyzer, Total Access Emailer, Total Access Statistics, and Total Visual CodeTools. He has also created custom solutions using Microsoft Access, SQL Server, Visual Studio, and LightSwitch for Windows, web and mobility platforms. FMS also has products for big data visualization used in the intelligence and law enforcement communities. He has spoken at conferences and user groups across the US, Europe, and Australia, and written numerous technical articles. Luke holds a degree in physical oceanography from Harvard.
Kevin Bell
USING SQL SERVER AND AZURE WITH MICROSOFT ACCESS
Kevin (and perhaps other Access team members) will reveal new features for Access Web applications that are specifically targeted to developers. He can’t divulge the details until the conference – let’s just say there’s good stuff on the way.
Kevin Bell is a test engineer on the Microsoft Access team in Redmond Washington. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2008, Kevin was a partner in a consulting practice that specialized in building custom software solutions, primarily with Microsoft Access connected to a SQL Server backend. Over a 15+ year consulting career he has created a variety of applications from a management system for a small drapery shop with a handful of users, to a compliance tracking system for a large insurance company with hundreds of users in multiple locations.
Like many Access Developers, Kevin’s career with Access started by accident. While working in Melbourne, Australia for an illumination engineering firm, he started modernizing the company’s testing reports using Microsoft Excel. Excel offered a rich presentation layer, but it wasn’t very efficient at managing large amounts of data. Databases at the time lacked graphical capabilities and Microsoft’s newly released Visual Basic lacked database support. Then Access 1.0 arrived, combining the best elements of all three, and Kevin was hooked.
Over the years Kevin has been a member, officer and frequent presenter at the Denver Area Access User Group and now regularly attends the Pacific Northwest Access Developers Group. He has also presented at the UK Access Group National Seminar, and at the Portland Access User Group Spring Conference.