Unit Testing and Todo Lists in VBA: Announcing Rubberduck Version 1.0

Have you ever wanted to properly unit test your VBA code or simply wished the VBA editor had a Task List window that picked up your Todo comments? The wait is over friends. It’s here.

Setting Up a Debug Environment for VBA

VBA supports Conditional Compilation. Most often this is used to switch between different methods based on whether the installed version of Office is 32 or 64 bit, but it can also be used to set up a kind of debugging environment. Today we’ll take a look at what exactly conditional compilation is, and how to leverage it to make our programs behave differently while we’re developing.

A Better Visual Studio for the Little Guy: First Impressions of Visual Studio Community

I suppose that you’d have to be living under a rock if you haven’t heard by now, but Microsoft just announced some pretty big news. No, I’m not talking about how they just open sourced the .NET framework. I’m talking about the new free Visual Studio offering, Visual Studio Community.

This isn’t just a rebranded Express. No, this is a full fledged IDE friends. There will be no more needing multiple versions of VS in order to build both web and desktop apps. This one does it all.

This also isn’t just all of the different Express versions rolled into one either. In Scott Hanselman’s words, “This is practically Pro.” Community lets you start a process when the debugger starts, rather than attach it after the fact. That seems like a little thing, but trust me, it’s not. I’ve been working on a COM add in recently and this has saved me 3 or 4 clicks every time I need to step through some code. Community also gives you a full stack trace and exception information at the tips of your fingers. It helped me track down a bug in minutes that had been driving me mad for a week.

VS Community is available for free to open source developers, for educational purposes, and companies with 5 or less developers. I really can’t recommend it enough. If you’re using Express, go get yourself a copy of Community. I’m sure I’ve not even really scratched the surface on what Community can do that Express can’t, so leave a comment with the best “new” features you’ve found.

Meta Programming in VBA: The VBIDE and Why Documentation is Important

A while back I shared a Stack Overflow Question about dynamically adding code to a module in VBA. I promised I would come back and write more about my experience in the area of meta programming VBA later. I guess now is the time friends. You see, I’ve been working on a toolbox of sorts. A big part of that project is making it easier to work with the Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications Extensibility library. That library is not well documented to say the least. So, I want to share what I’ve found out about the Extensibility library with you.