Thinking about Access and SQL Server 2005?
Might I suggest: "Plan to plan and test carefully too."
There's been an interesting thread on the SQL Server Newsgroups about this topic. A developer was trying to create an ADP to work against express and got this message:
You have connected to a version of SQL Server later than SQL Server 2000. The version of Visual Studio or Access that you are using was released before the version of SQL Server to which you are connected. For this reason, you might encounter problems.
Mary Chapman from Microsoft posted this response:
You will not be able to use any of the designers with SQLS 2005 databases, whether it's SQL Express or the Developer edition. IOW, you won't be able to create databases, tables, views or any other database objects from an ADP. The only support that is envisioned is that you will be able to connect an Access front-end to a SQLS 2005 back end if it is running in SQLS 2000 compatibility mode, so your forms, reports and other local Access objects should still run. There is no service pack or quick fix being planned as far as I know because of the amount of work it would entail. If you stop to think about it, it's pretty hard to see how accomodating new Yukon features like CLR assemblies and complex data types in the ADP designers could be achieved without a complete rewrite.
That said, with Access 2003, I was able to connect up to an instance of SQL 2005 (not in 2000 compatibility mode) and work with data with SQL2000 compatible data types. I was also able to stick XML into an XML-typed (but not strongly-typed) column and have it work as expected.
The bottom line here seems to be that ADPs aren't worth investing new work into today if you plan to go to SQL Server 2005 with them. However, my limited testing of Access 2003 as the Frontend and SQL Server 2005 as backend using linked tables seems to be okay. Time will tell, of course.