Eliminating Friction

Want to write better code? Eliminate friction around best practices.

Best Practice: Error Logging

DON'T write custom error logging on an as-needed basis.

DO use a global error handler and vbWatchdog to centralize error logging.

Best Practice: Throwing Custom Errors

DON'T maintain some huge master list of custom error numbers.

DO automatically generate unique custom error numbers on the fly.

Best Practice: Version Control

DON'T manually export and import VBA code to text files.

DO use a script or add-in to convert all Access objects to text files.

Best Practice: Don't Repeat Yourself

DON'T copy and paste code snippets from one application to another.

DO maintain a library of code that never breaks backward compatibility.

Best Practice: Professional Installers

DON'T use a wizard-based product with lots of manual steps.

DO use a text/script-based installer creator like Inno Setup.

Investing in the Future

What do all of these things have in common?

In almost all cases, there is a relatively significant upfront investment of time to accomplish the task for the first time. For example, it probably took me a dozen or more hours to create my first installer in Inno Setup. Now, though, I can create an extremely professional installer for a new application in under five minutes.

A professional installer in less than five minutes? Now that is low-friction.

Before I switched to using Inno Setup, I used a wizard-based Microsoft product. It was impossible to recreate installers. Every installer was a little different than the last one, and there was no easy way to tell how one installer was different from another (do I need Setup-v3.exe or Setup-Final.exe or Setup-Final-New.exe?).

The Microsoft installer was faster the first time.

But Inno Setup was faster over time.