No Longer Set (Page 60)

One Thing at a (Hundred) Times

How to use Run() and GetTickCount() for some quick and dirty performance profiling. Come for the code, stay for the scolding on premature optimization.

Hidden Features

A Rounding We Will Go

Two kinds of rounding, the VBA language spec vs. the Office VBA implementation, and a drop-in replacement for VBA.Round().

Commentary

Two Ways to Burn

Burning cardboard is a lot like a large data migration. You can do it all at once or slowly over time.

Commentary

The Curse of Reliable Software

How does one avoid the reliability paradox? One option is to intentionally write unreliable, buggy software. There's a better option.

Hidden Features

Expressions vs. Code

When is code not code? When it's an expression. What's the difference and who really cares? Let's explore.

Commentary

Lightweight Forms? Just Don't

Lightweight forms make your code harder to read and debug, but if your users have monitors with high enough refresh rates, they'll appreciate the effort.

Commentary

Weekend Warriors

Wherein I compare keyboard warriors to actual warriors.

Code Library

Come Together

Do you build strings in loops? Stop trimming the delimiter at the end of the loop. There's a better way.

Code Library

Quoth thy SQL? Evermore!

Solving the "O'Malley problem" with dedicated functions to sanitize our strings. Little Bobby Tables would be proud.

Commentary

Building Your Library

Thirteen years ago, I chose to maintain a folder of text files rather than a single Access database library. I've never once regretted that decision.

Professional Development

Journey to Access: Part 3

A morass of Word documents and Excel workbooks--the invasive plant species of the Windows world--overgrowing your file system like so much digital kudzu.

Professional Development

Journey to Access: Part 2

The weirdos who enjoy spending lots of time to avoid doing mundane tasks that only take a little time have their own special name: programmers. Welcome to our very weird club.

Professional Development

Journey to Access: Part 1

Many of the best Microsoft Access applications are written by people with no formal background in software development. Your origin story starts here.

Tools

My Favorite Things

Here is a list of my favorite utilities, add-ins, OCX controls, and applications that I use when developing Microsoft Access applications.

Commentary

Past is Prologue

A personal reflection on my software development journey. There's more to creating great software than knowing how to write code.

Testing

VBA Doc Tests: Advanced Features

Let's take our doc tests to the next level. I'll show you how to use my custom DocTests function to test classes, private functions, and error conditions.

Testing

Python-inspired Doc Tests in VBA

Doc tests are not a replacement for unit or integration testing. But they do provide the best return on investment (ROI) of any type of test, mostly because the effort to write them is near zero.

Conventions

VBA Squeeze Box

I discussed previously the differences between passing by value and passing by reference. I now want to discuss how and when I use each in my own code.

Basic

One if ByRef, and Two if ByVal

Arguments in VBA are passed by reference by default. What does that mean? And what are the differences between passing by reference and by value?

Version Control

Access Version Control: My Philosophy

These rules are intended as a guiding philosophy. If I'm getting closer to meeting this vision, I know I'm moving in the right direction.

Version Control

Putting It All Together

I expanded on the original decompose.vbs script. The code below is the culmination of more than 50 individual changes and tweaks over 10+ years.

Version Control

Exporting Queries for Version Control

SaveAsText will export queries to text files, but calling those files "human-readable" is a stretch.

Version Control

Tracking Table Structure Changes

Another potential source of bugs is changes to the structures of our tables. This includes both local tables and linked tables that reside in our back-end.

Version Control

Referencing references

While we can use the VBA user interface to display the references, we can't rely on that approach if we want to automate exporting our Access binary file to text files. Luckily, there is a solution.

Version Control

Tables to Text: Do it for the DVCS!

Anything that can lead to a bug in your software belongs in version control. That includes local tables with design-time data.