In my particular case: I experience the need to read at any given moment more like thirst. Most of the time water will suffice, meaning I could read anything available to me however, like with thirst; sometimes I feel either whisky or soda is the only thing that will quench it, meaning that I HAVE to read either a technical or a fiction book and not the other. I could also be reading multiple books in parallel, usually either technical or fiction and rarely ever any other genre but which one it is at any given moment depends on that thirst otherwise I find reading non-enjoyable.

My first 'puter was a Sinclair ZX81, with its standard 1Kb RAM. Less than a month later I had the 16Kb RAM expansion which BTW, was so heavy it was almost impossible to keep the Sinclair balanced. For me, it was the best thing ever invented after the TV set.

I am by no means an expert, but I have done some 2D and 3D animations for church and school. That said, I have used only open source software and I see how easy you could produce very profesional looking products. If this young friend of yours is willing to work in the open source world, this is what I've tried: 2D tools:

• Pencil 2D
• Synfig

3D tools:

• Here, I've only used Blender, but Blender is a "batteries included" product

Blender is not good in everything it does, but it does everything you need(*); from character design to creating and applying textures, to animation, to video production, and video & audio editing. All the steps necessary to produce high quality, professional looking videos. There is also a myriad of free online resources so you can learn how to use it, even some full courses on youtube. There are many, many free, open source tools to do animation and digital art, INKSCAPE is another tool I've used. Gimp and Krita are other MUST HAVES. Take a look into this article: 11 Free and Open Source Software for Artists but trust me; there is more than just 11 tools. HTH (*) The video editor for example, is dreaded by some people but it was good enough for my (rather simple) needs. And fear not, there are also a few open source video editors which ended up too complicated for a non-expert like me.

+1

All have given you sound advice but forget to mention wix.com: DO NOT USE WIX! DO NOT USE WIX!DO NOT USE WIX!

AFAIK, Docker for WindoZe is mostly meant for developing purposes and is not yet recommended for production(*) (at least last time I checked.) (*) Just as much as WindoZe recommended for production isn't either ...

You can use GIMP for that purpose, and it works pretty much the same on Windoze, Mac or Linux. Check this tutorial.

I never said that. I said FASTER DEVELOPMENT TIME. Of course a .NET is going to perform FASTER, though not necessarily BETTER, as this is very subjective and depends very much on the business needs. In other words, yes .NET is better; but is that what the customer needs or wants? You first have to find out if the application fulfills their needs and if the changes they recently required are important enough that it would require not an overhaul but a completely new product. In my experience, if a customer has been using a certain tool for years; our responsibility as analysts is to determine whether this tool will grow with the users needs. That is all you have to find out. Is their database reaching the maximum recommended size? Are there over 20 concurrent users? How much longer is Access being supported? You answer those questions and you'll find out whether you need to create a new .NET application, overhaul the existing one, just leave it as it is or any other solution in between.

Limited, yes, but it doesn't make Access a handicapped product. It is not a one size fits all for sure. In my personal experience, the magical number for concurrent users is around 22, though you will start to feel the weight at 12 concurrent users. As for the limitations of the database again, move to SQL Express. The benefits are endless, and you still have an environment that allows for fast development. Trust me; there is still a lot of magic in MS Access and BTW, despite some gossips going around; Microsoft DOES NOT have plans to discontinue this product, as there is indeed a very large user base making use of it, specially as a front end. Fast and dirty? Probably, but never trashy. You can make great looking applications with it.

I agree with you a 100%. Even if the customer cannot afford to buy the full fledged MS SQL Server, using the Express version is still better than staying with the Jet engine. A lot can be done with MS Access and SQL Server, and and a whole lot faster than by using .NET, specially if we are talking about an application for that basically does CRUD operations. I think the original poster is just a hater that just can't figure out MS Access & VBA. Saludos!