A family of Microsoft relational database management systems designed for ease of use.
Tom,
It is clear that Microsoft have the ability to remotely control the behaviour of Microsoft Access without the need for users to upgrade their version/build of Office or Windows.
It is clear that this ability can have a worldwide effect on the behaviour of Microsoft Access within one hour.
It is clear that Microsoft Access does not even need to be restarted to respond to this control.
This could only be achieved through some form of communication between Microsoft Access and Microsoft’s servers via the internet.
The only known channel for such a communication is though the product activation/licencing features of Microsoft 365.
The recent problematic behaviour of Microsoft Access shows the symptoms of it running in some sort of debugging mode.
- As a form closed it would show a variety of error messages (e.g. No Current Record, Property Not Found etc)
- These error messages were not exposed to or controlled by the VBA project running the application code
- The occurrence of a message and it’s content depends upon the previous behaviour of the closing form (e.g. manipulation of recordsets by underlying code)
- Under certain circumstances, the behaviour causes Access to crash
Is the product activation procedure activating/deactivating this special debugging mode?
What can we as developers do to ensure that if/when it happens again, our applications are only subjected to the benign error messages and not the catastrophic system crashes?