Session 6 was a very nice presentation by Juan Soto on selling databases and working with customers. He’s been very successful selling Access projects and developing a team of developers who can deliver. Great presentation from Juan!

Session 7 was a fun session with interactive polls to vote on which version control add-in tool was best at each stage of developing an Access app. Ivercy and VCS-Addin. Phillip started off with an excellent overview of the benefits of using a version control systems and the basic types of VCS implementations out there and how their add-ins are interacting with Access to create files for each object that can be versioned and then how those changes can be committed to a local Git repository and then pushed to Github. It was all in fun and a great look at both of the plugins.

In Session 8 Ynte walked us through creating Power Automate workflows to accept parameters and send emails, and then kicking off those workflows in VBA using a nice VBA library to manage API calls and sending JSON data as the parameters to the flow. Looks promising for sending emails and doing all sorts of things in the Microsoft ecosystem and beyond using Power Automate and triggering those workflows using VBA.

In Session 9 Mike Wolfe first gave an update on the state of twinBasic and announced it would likely be reaching version 1 (meaning fully or almost 100% compatible with VB 6) in July of 2025. He went over several cool ideas for creating Windows services easily for various tasks like detecting events and checking for app upgrades for your Access app. The second portion of the presentation focused on tips for using AI LLMs to take advantage of context windows and overcome potential limitations with said windows. Fantastic Mike!

In the final session Colin Riddington returned to showcase his powerful tools for Access including Database Analyzer Pro, Custom Ribbon tool, and a SQL to VBA tool that allows you to quickly transform the SQL of a query into a quoted string for a VBA variable. Colin is quite amazing and builds very thorough and beautiful apps.

So overall, I enjoyed interacting with the Access developer community during the conference and learned a lot about honing my AI skills, saw some new tools I’ll want to use, and have a lot more rabbit holes I can go down into!