<RANT ON>MS is no longer including Jet in the MDAC redistributable as of version 2.6. Why not? I can't find *any* reference *anywhere* as to their reason for this. To make matters worse, if I want to use the Visual Studio Installer, I have to use the wrapper.exe kludge to get MDAC installed in the process, using a pre-2.6 version of MDAC. But what happens if MDAC 2.6 is already on the machine, and no previous version (and therefore, no Jet version) has been installed on it, which will probably happen when Windows XP come out? How do I make the installer run the redistributable Jet 4.0 SP3 setup?
o I've explored switching from ADO to DAO, but DAO still needs MDAC.
o I looked at using the older Visual Basic P&D Wizard, but there's still that MDAC 2.6 cloud hanging over my solution.
o Installshield looks viable: it looks like they have Merge Modules for Access97 & 2K, and for various flavors of MDAC, but again, what happens when a machine out there has only ever had MDAC 2.6+ on it and never Jet? And then there's the price (which I wouldn't mind if I knew I'd be doing alot more VB6 development).
I can't imagine I'm the *only* person in the world wondering what the heck is going on. It seems like there are so many VB apps out there that use Jet databases, why would MS pull the rug out from under them? Are they trying to force developers into using desktop SQL 7/2K (a.k.a. MSDE)? I mean, why come up with a decent tool like the new VS Installer and leave out a huge chunk of functionality like support for actually *installing* (and not just "checking for") MDAC , not to mention Jet, by not having MS-supplied .msm files for them?
Anybody? Bueller? Anyone? :-)