On 11 Oct 2010 at 7:31, Phil Daley wrote: > If it accesses Microsoft's Access database, it won't work.
This is simply not true. At one time it was a half truth, but it has never been an actual true statement. The situation is this: Until the release of 64-bit Microsoft Office, there was only a 32-bit version of the Jet/ACE database engine (the default database engine that ships with Access). This meant that if you were a programmer and you chose to compile your application for 64-bit, and it depended on the Jet/ACE database engine, you were out of luck -- you had to compile for 32-bit or you had to remove the dependency on the Jet/ACE database engine. However, Microsoft released along with 64-bit Office 2010 a 64-bit version of the Jet/ACE database engine. This was required, since Access is one of the flagship Office applications, and it was known long before the release of Office 2010 that the 64-bit Jet/ACE database engine was on the way. Indeed, it made available in beta for separate download months before the actual release of Office 2010. Now, one wrinkle in this is that the old version of Jet/ACE, Jet 4.0, is part of Windows (and has been since Windows 2000 -- it's used for interaction the Active Directory). That was the version of the database engine that Access itself used until Access 2007, when the Access team forked the code base and created their own private version of the database engine, generally referred to as ACE. It is really an undated version of Jet and is fully compatible with previous versions of Jet, but it is independent of Jet. The Windows development team retains control of the Jet 4 database engine, which is frozen (except for security fixes). Jet 4 will never be 64-bit, so if you are programming a hard-wired dependency on Jet 4, you will have the problems I outlined above (i.e., limited to 32-bit compilation of your application). But if you've instead built your application to use Jet/ACE, you're golden for the foreseeable future. This has been the case for AT LEAST A YEAR, and Phil, you should not be propagating such inaccurate information. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
