In his You Can Vote to Get ADO for Microsoft Access® to Connect to SQL Azure™ post of 10/9/2010, Patrick Wood wrote:
Microsoft has put much more emphasis lately on listening to developers and users when they ask for Features to be added to Microsoft Software. This has led to many improvements in new software releases and updates. Microsoft is really listening to us but you have to know where to give them your requests.
A few days ago on the SQL Azure Feature Voting Forum I put in a request for “Microsoft Access ADO–Enable Microsoft Access ADO 2.x Connections to SQL Azure.” My comment was “This will enable more secure connections to SQL Azure and provide additional functionality. ODBC linked tables and queries expose your entire connection string including your server, username, and password.”
On Friday Roger Jennings posted about this on his Roger Jennings’ Access Blog, “I agreed and added three votes.” He also wrote about it on his software consulting organization blog, OakLeaf Systems and added a link to the The #sqlazure Daily which I have found to be a great place to keep up with the very latest tweets, articles, and news about SQL Azure. Roger Jennings has written numerous books about programming with Microsoft Software, a number of which have been about Microsoft Access. His books are among the very best about Access and contain a wealth of helpful detailed information. I have never had a conversation or any correspondence with before now but I greatly appreciate his support in this matter.
Why do we need ADO (this is not ADO.Net) when we have ODBC to link tables and queries to SQL Azure? If you are just planning to use SQL Azure for your own use you can get by fine without it. But if you distribute Access Databases that use SQL Azure as a back end then you have to be very careful because an ODBC DSN is a plain text file that contains your server web address, your user name, and your password. If you use DSN-less linked tables and queries another programmer can easily read all your connection information through the TableDef.Connect or QueryDef.Connect properties even if you save your database as an accde or mde file.
ADO allows you to use code to connect to SQL Server and if we had the same capability with SQL Azure this would allow us to keep all of our connection information in code. Then using accde or mde files will provide us with better security. ADO also provides additional functionality which can make developing with SQL Azure easier.
We have already picked up a few votes for ADO but we need a lot more to let Microsoft know there are enough of us developers who want ADO to make it worthy of their attention.
You can vote for ADO here. You can use 3 votes at a time and your support is greatly appreciated.
You can read more about SQL Azure and Microsoft Access at my Gaining Access website.
Happy computing,
Patrick (Pat) Wood
Gaining Access
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