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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T06:29:06+00:00

In company that I work for, I was given the opportunity to write an

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In company that I work for, I was given the opportunity to write an application, which would replace the old Excel workbook, which is used to plan the production queue. Because VBA was simple and Excel was easy to use, for few years this workbook was used by several people to plan/add changes/notes about current production status. Whole workbook has few feature’s (additional information about products are stored in different sheets, etc), but is lacking many more.

I sketched how it looks like (I recreated it from memory, simplified the layout, so it can be readable):

workbook

This is only a sketch, but the original one is as ugly, impractical and limited as this one.

I was hoping to create simple forms based application, which could be used by at least a few people simultaneously (each one having his own copy, though all copies would use single MS Access database for storing information).

What do I need to know about if I plan to accomplish this? What are the guidelines for creating multiuser applications?

I would also want to know if is there any way to recreate a similar layout using one of free/included .NET controls? Labels and alike are not the problem, but people need to move those colorful bars easily as well as add new ones in as easy as possible. I know that canvas-like controls exist in other languages and I was thinking about using one here. Is this a good choice or is there another, better one?

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  1. Editorial Team

    1. I wouldn’t use C++ to do this, there is no real need. I would suggest VB.NET or C#… unless of course you’re already highly familiar with C++ and not the other languages.

    2. There is no free control that comes with the .NET framework to do what you described. The third party controls suggested by others here are great. There is also another at http://www.janusys.com

    3. Multi-User networked database systems should not be implemented using Microsoft Access as it doesn’t quite function well in that specific environment. You could use something like WCF to interface to an access MDB file and have all apps speak to the WCF component, but that’s totally unnecessary IMO. I would recommend using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express. Very powerful and free for a certain amount of users. If you want to go open source, I would recommend using Postgres instead of MySql. This is just my recommendation as I believe it’s a better system up to date with Relational Database standards.

    4. Try to use some other third party tools such as subsonic to interface with your database. Very helpful and fairly simple to use. http://www.subsonicproject.com.

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