Leveraging the Mainframe in Business Solutions with Microsoft Access and Visual Basic

Kenneth M. Lassesen

Ken Lassesen is a Developer Technology Engineer for Microsoft Developer Network. He writes on Visual Basic, Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Basic for Applications, Office Products, Multimedia Viewer, and Windows Help. Ken has held a wide variety of positions and started programming in 1969 with APL/360 and WatFor.

Click to open or copy the files in the VB207 sample application for this technical article.

Introduction

This session is designed to introduce developers to the issues involved in developing business applications for Microsoft® Windows® using data from mainframe computers. The emphasis is on prototypes and rapid application development. This material is directed at both mainframe developers interested in moving applications to Windows and at Visual Basic® developers needing to access data from the mainframe.

This session will cover:

• The differences and similarities between mainframes and client-server architectures
• Creating an application in record time, starting with only a mainframe database
• Hints for recycling mainframe COBOL programmers

For the code sample used in this session, see the following:

• VB207.MDB, a Microsoft Access database
• Visual Basic sample application A2VB.MAK

This session uses both Microsoft Access and Visual Basic to exploit the strengths of each product. Visual C++™ can be substituted for Visual Basic.