Comments on Doc Comments

I was reviewing some VBA code over at Code Review Stack Exchange the other day and it got me to thinking about comments. The code wasn’t too bad, but there were so many comments in the code that, well…

I just read over this again and I think the fact that I mention the comments so often really highlights the issue. I barely even looked at the code because I was too distracted by all the comments.

VBA and Git the Sequel: This Time it’s Integrated

I’ve talked before about using Git with VBA and also about the importance of using source control and other tools for our work. Truthfully though, using source control with VBA is still hard. This is mostly because getting the code modules into and out of the VB Project is hard, and harder to do right. Well, you may have heard that there’s a new duck in town. It’s taken me about 6 months of spare time, but Rubberduck v1.4 not only has a source control COM library that you can use right in VBA to work with Git VBA repositories, but you can also now branch, commit, pull, push, and merge right from inside of the editor.

Mocking the VBA Editor: Moq an IEnumerable that Works with Linq

It’s been a rough morning here. I’ve just spent six hours trying to properly create a mock for the VBProject interface. There’s very little information out there about this, so I thought I’d take a moment to jot this down and save someone else the headache. For all the grief this gave me, the solution is amazing simple.

Iterate over a date range in VBA

After years of VBA development, I’m still learning about the language every day. I was absolutely surprised when I tried this today. You can iterate over a date range just like you can iterate over a range of integers.

Public Sub LoopOverDateRange()
    
    Const startDate As Date = #5/13/2015#
    Const endDate As Date = #5/20/2015#
    
    Dim d As Date
    Dim i As Integer
    i = 1
    For d = startDate To endDate
        Debug.Print "Iteration " & i & ":" & vbTab & d
        i = i + 1
    Next
    
End Sub

This code will result in the following output.

Iteration 1:    5/13/2015
Iteration 2:    5/14/2015
Iteration 3:    5/15/2015
Iteration 4:    5/16/2015
Iteration 5:    5/17/2015
Iteration 6:    5/18/2015
Iteration 7:    5/19/2015
Iteration 8:    5/20/2015

Enjoy!

VB Attributes: What are they and why should we use them?

Did you know that there’s code in your VBA projects that you can’t see in your editor? Want to see it? (Of course you do.)

v1.21 is here! (yes, including for 64-bit Office!)

Fixed the bugs we did. Better we made it. =;)-

v1.21 is here! (yes, including for 64-bit Office!).

Some Days…

It’s been a crazy day. I found out that we have users on the other side of the globe, Rubberduck doesn’t work in 64 bit versions of Office, and JetBrains gave us a free Open Source license of ReSharper. Oh… And I worked a full day putting out fires at the office. Some times things get surreal. 

I just wanted to share this with everyone and let you know what’s coming down the pipe for the blog. I still owe you a look at what we’re planning for the next minor release of Rubberduck (Hint: it includes support for Office 64x…). I also want to do a small series about VBA attributes over the next few weeks. They’re very cool and under utilized in my opinion. That’s probably because there is next to no documentation available. So, I’m going to pick one or two to talk about at a time and document what I happen to know about them. 

Until then,

Happy Coding.

The Professional VBA Developer

I came across a post on Programmer’s Stack Exchange yesterday that really irked me. It took me a little while to really digest what upset me about it, but I think I understand now. This developer was asking for more reasons to back up his claim that he should move his solution from VBA to C#. That in itself is fine. As I stated in my response, I understand his desire to move his solution to C#. I wish I could move all of my projects to the .Net platform myself.

No. Wanting to move to a more modern technology was not my issue with his question. My problem was with how he acted like working in an old technology gave him a pass on being a professional.

Version 1.2 is here!

Version 1.2 of Rubberduck has arrived. I’ll follow up soon with some thoughts about it and where we’re heading next.

Rubberduck News

I’m really excited to announce this, so I’ll get to the point…

Version 1.2 just released!

The most visible change is all of the new Code Inspections. There were only a handful of them in Version 1.1, but now Rubberduck is finding all kinds of issues with VBA code. Everything from obsolete syntax to unused variables. It’s really very cool.

The other very visible change is the addition of an Extract Method refactoring tool. Highlight some code, and extract it into its own method. Awesome. This one is very much like the static code analysis was in the last version, just a glimpse at the great things to come.

There were also a lot of improvements under the hood. We entirely swapped out the parser that allows us to do much of what we’ve done. Along with that, we’ve fixed a verifiable crap ton of bugs and UX problems. I’m…

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See a Need, Fill a Need

I’ve been fairly absent from this blog lately. I’ve been busy working on a new release of Rubberduck and, honestly, there are only so many hours in a day. More importantly, there are only so many concentrated thoughts to go around in 24 hours. So, I apologize for being gone for so long. I hope you can forgive me when you see the results. I’m really excited about our next release. There’s some really awesome things in there. You can download the pre-release now if you’re interested. There are a few kinks to work out, but things should be stable very soon.

To be truthful though, that project is the last thing I want to talk about right now. Rubberduck has become an obsession. There have been so many early mornings and late nights that I can’t possibly count them. There will be more. Many more. We’re only getting warmed up… and I’m going to talk about it anyway. It is an obsession after all. Like any addict, I just can’t let it go.