And now for something completely different…
Instead of having 5 presentations with no link (other than the superb quality) from five different presenters, we present to you:The App-in-a-day conference!
What does this mean? We have lined up 6 fantastic international presenters who will collaborate on a single objective for the end of the day – the development of a new app.
Presenting in various guises are:
- Armen Stein
- Anders Ebro
- Kevin Bell
- Peter Bryant
- Steve Girling
- Andrew Richards
Book your tickets now!
Note: Accommodation for this event
Because we're holding this event in a hotel, and in expectation that some people will want to stay overnight the night before (especially if you're planning to join us for the pre-conference dinner) we have organised a few hotel rooms. These are for the night before the conference and are in limited supply. We may be able to source more rooms if all the current bookings sell out, but we can't guarantee the price we'll be able to get. Please note that all hotel room bookings are non-cancellable (that's the hotel's conditions, not ours!)
If you'd like to grab one of the rooms, add that as an additional ticket type below - so you'll need to book a ticket for the conference plus a ticket for accommodation.
Note: Rooms do not include breakfast. We thought there might be better places nearby to go for breakfast...
So how is this conference going to work?
For this session, Andrew will be a "customer with a requirement". Or more accurately, a "customer with a spreadsheet". He will discuss with Armen Stein how to make this requirement into a database.
You may know Armen from such shows as “The UKAUG May 2025 conference”. Armen is flying over once again from Seattle to help. He’ll explain how he’d approach a commission like this. He’ll talk a little about the design process – including creating screen flows, statements of works, and wireframes - bringing examples from his team of designers at J Street Technology. He’ll talk about how he’d think of pricing this commission and the decisions he’d make along the way.Armen will then lead a team of crack developers – led by Anders Ebro who we’re delighted to say is once again going to join us from sunny(?) Denmark as one of our most highly-regarded previous presenters, and Kevin Bell, also flying in all the way from the USA. Steve Girling will be flying in from Royal Wootten Bassett... and Peter will be wandering over from Darkest Fenland.
Even more development!
Over the day, the app will be developed to include such functionality as
- Adding and configuring a ribbon and a tree view for navigation around your project (Kevin Bell)
- Advanced and interesting things to do with Access reports (Anders Ebro)
- Approaches to importing existing, non-normalised data into a relational database (Peter Bryant)
- Creating a UI which doesn't even look like Access is in use (Steve Girling)
- Temporal tables - what they are, why they're useful and how to implment them (Kevin Bell)
And running as a thread through the day will be how to successfully manage the project (Armen) when your customer doesn't have a clue what they want (Andrew).
Andrew, Peter and Armen will pull together the lessons of the day, and with the rest of the team discuss how it went, take questions and lead a discussion on the app and its development.
Just after lunch
At suitable junctures
A word from our sponsors
Tea / Coffee / maybe orange juice.
A word from our sponsors...
J Street Technology is a database application development shop offering requirements assessment, web and Access application development and support, Business Intelligence dashboards, and system integration services to customers across North America.
Chris Arnold
A fellow of CIMA, Chris started out crunching numbers as FD of a number of companies, but couldn’t resist the call of computers—first programming on an Apple IIe with a whopping 8k of memory. Chris was a pioneer, networking Apple IIe’s in the UK and sharing the ride with business groups (thanks, Apple!).
After years in finance, Chris built a business, discovered Access 97, and never looked back. As a consultant, Chris specialized in fixing corporate system conflicts, primarily using Access—and saving clients a cool £½ billion along the way.
Graph Authenticator a tool which
- Solves the "New Outlook" problem
- Allows connecting to M365, including when using Multi-Factor Authentication
- Allows your Access database to talk to Teams
- And SharePoint, OneDrive, MS Bookings, InTune, Entra AD and a whole lot more
Andrew Richards and Peter Bryant built the tool together, and have now succesfully brought the power of any modern M365 app to Access.
About your speakers...
Kevin Bell
Kevin launched his career on Access 1.0 and has been honing his SQL Server skills since version 4.21. For 15 years, he led a Colorado-based consulting firm, crafting data-driven desktop solutions with Access and SQL Server. In 2008, he joined the Microsoft Access team as a test engineer—shaping the Access 2010, 2013, and 2016 releases. Now in his second consulting chapter, Kevin specializes in hybrid applications built on Access, SQL Server, .NET Blazor, React, Rust, and Tauri. When he’s not building custom solutions, he’s either cycling or traveling the world in pursuit of the perfect pint of ale.
Armen Stein
Armen Stein is the founder and president of J Street Technology, a team of about 15 developers, designers and support staff located near Seattle. J Street has designed and built hundreds of custom Access desktop and ASP.NET web applications since 1994, and also supports dozens of Access and web applications built by others. Armen is a Microsoft MVP since 2006, and has spoken at many user groups and conferences around the world, including Vienna DevKon, Office DevCon in Australia, the PAUG Conference (now Access Cascade Conference), Access Day events, the UK Access User Group in London, and the NADD conference in Amsterdam. He also regularly guest lectures on requirements discovery and database design at a local college. His other interests include travel, photography, Kauai, backgammon, trailer camping, movies, supporting people with disabilities in Nepal, and driving his 1969 Ford Bronco in the sun.
Anders Ebro
Anders is Danish and likes Lego.
He's quite good at Access.
He's also quite good at SQL.
And Excel.
And VBA.
He's also a pretty marvellous speaker, which is why he's been asked to present at conferences all around the world, and spent the best part of a decade as an MVP.
Those of you who've seen him speak before know that you'll be in for a treat in his session. Those of you who haven't - well, you're in for a treat too.
Peter Bryant
Peter has run his own consultancy since 2004 and (after a fashion) specialises in not specialising; he’s worked in almost every sector ranging from automotive to hi-fi, from reseller to print, and financial services to charity. He has used Microsoft Access since the early beta program over three (!) decades ago and his projects are now more about data analysis, function and business problem solving rather than producing stunning Oscar winning code.
Andrew Richards
Andrew has been running The IT Service since 2009, and building databases since 2000. He spends about 70% of his time building databases using Access and SQL, and the other 40% providing training in Access, SQL, cyber-security and various other topics.
He's consulted with a wide range of clients from museums (such as the British Museum) to universities (including Imperial College London and Oxford University) and from BBQ supply firms to forensic laboratories.
He lives with his partner Angela in East Sussex and provides care and support to sheep, chickens, guinea fowl and cats.