twinBASIC Update: February 26, 2023
Highlights include a big announcement for twinBASIC in the world of Access and the release of ZoneStripper, another of fafalone's VB6 twinBASIC ports.
On April 23, 2021, I helped Wayne Phillips introduce the world to twinBASIC at the Access DevCon Vienna conference. I boldly predicted that twinBASIC (along with the Monaco editor) would replace VBA and its outdated development environment by 2025. With that goal in mind, this weekly update is my attempt to keep the project fresh in the minds of the VBA development community.
Every Sunday, I will be providing updates on the status of the project, linking to new articles discussing twinBASIC, and generally trying to increase engagement with the project. If you come across items that should be included here, tweet me @NoLongerSet or email me at mike at nolongerset dot com.
Here are some links to get involved with the project:
- Custom twinBASIC IDE Installation Guide (NOTE: the twinBASIC VSCode extension is under a feature freeze until 2023)
- GitHub Issue Tracker (report bugs)
- twinBASIC Discord Server (chat about the project)
- twinBASIC/VBx LinkedIn Group
Highlights
It was a quiet week as Wayne's kids were home from school. I'm curious to see what next week brings. In the past, these weeks where Wayne didn't publish new releases have been followed by weeks with an explosion of new features. It's like his fingers get the week off but his brain switches into overdrive.
No pressure, Wayne!
And now that I've set sky-high expectations, I'll slowly disappear back into the hedges Homer Simpson-style.
Around the Web
twinBASIC at Access DevCon Vienna
For the third year in a row, I will be presenting a session on twinBASIC at Access DevCon Vienna, the largest English-speaking Access conference in the world. The now-online conference will take place April 27-28, 2023.
My topic will be, "Exploring the Future of twinBASIC and Access Development." (It is a Microsoft Access developers' conference after all.) Here's my working outline for the presentation:
• Brief introduction and overview of twinBASIC
• Updates on the project's progress over the past year
• Demo: tools built in twinBASIC available to Access developers today
• twinBASIC: a future migration path for Access projects?
Personally, I'm most excited about that last topic. Wayne has hinted at times that he has plans for twinBASIC and Access, but he's played those cards close to the vest. I don't even know what those plans are yet. I have a meeting scheduled with Wayne at the beginning of March. I can't wait to hear what he has in mind and share that with the rest of the Access community.
Most DevCon presentations are never publicly released. If you want to hear what Wayne has in store for Access and twinBASIC, be sure to register for the conference here:
Access DevCon Vienna Registration
ZoneStripper
Another week, another VB6 project ported to twinBASIC from fafalone. This week it's ZoneStripper:
Removes the Zone.Identifier alternate data stream that identifies files as 'from the internet'
With Microsoft taking away the option to click through warnings about macro enabled documents and load them anyway, it's becoming more important to 'unblock' these documents, among various other reasons you'd want to do this for other files. It's easy enough to do this manually for a single file through Explorer (however, this only changes, not removes, the zone identifier), but it might get tedious if you have a lot of files. ZoneStripper will recursively (or single level) go through a folder and completely remove the zone identifier from all files, making them just like any other file that came from your own computer rather than the internet.
Recent changes to Office macro security mean that most Office files that you download from the internet (or via email, or certain network folders, etc.) carry the so-called "Mark of the Web." If you've got a lot of files to unblock, this utility could save you some serious time.
Changelog
Here are the updates from the past week. You can also find this information by visiting the GitHub twinBASIC Releases page.
WaynePhillipsEANo releases this week.
