Deprecated vs. Obsolete

I was recently reading about Microsoft Data Access Components, and noted that some components have been deprecated, while other components have been marked as obsolete. What exactly is the difference between deprecated and obsolete? I came across the following definitions:
  • Code that is tagged as "deprecated" is officially still available for use but will typically have already been scheduled for removal at some point, so it is in your best interests to start looking for an alternative.
  • Code that is tagged as "obsolete" is offically no longer supported and shouldn't play a part in any normal build, but those features might still be available if you absolutely need to access them. You are *strongly* discouraged from continuing to depend on obsolete code on an ongoing, long-term basis.

As of today, the following MDAC components have been deprecated:

  • Microsoft Jet Database Engine
  • MSDASQL(the OLE DB provider for ODBC)
  • Remote Data Services (RDS)

The following MDAC components have become obsolete:

  • the former Data Access Objects API
  • Remote Data Objects

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The agony of victory....a.k.a. picking my jaw up off the floor

"The Axis of Evil and the Doctrine of Preemption Three Years On"

Removing a password that was created in a previous version from an Access 2007 database