Best practices for implementing an Microsoft Access application

Question

Where can I find an overview (website) of best practices for implementing an Microsoft Access application (with a FE/BE architecture) regarding to security, performance and maintainability? I know about designing tables, queries, forms and so on and I'm a reasonable programmer, but I'm wondering what's the "best" and most efficient way to implement my Access application.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Take a look at Tony Toews' Best Practices for Microsoft Access. Since you're developing a split application you owe it to yourself to also consider Tony's Auto FE Updater. That utility (which he offers for free) makes it fairly easy to roll out your application front end to the users, and make sure that they are always working from your latest app version.

I will also suggest you try to avoid basing your application's forms on large data sets. For example, rather than binding a form directly to a large table, bind it to a query which returns only one or a few rows from the table. Allow your users to select which row or rows they are interested in at any given time. The point here is to limit the amount of data Access must retrieve when the users open your form.