twinBASIC Update: January 27, 2025

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 I boldly predicted that twinBASIC (along with the Monaco editor) would replace VBA and its outdated development environment by 2025.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~~ ~~Monday~~ week, 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, please leave a comment below.

Here are some links to get involved with the project:

Highlights

Dedicated Local App Folder for tB Addins and Themes

Beginning with BETA 667, addins, language packs, and themes can now be loaded from a dedicated twinBASIC folder in your user profile's application data folder:

%APPDATA%\twinBASIC

The exact location will vary by computer and user. If you enter %APPDATA%\twinBASIC in the address bar of Windows Explorer, it will expand to the actual location for your user profile. For example, on my home computer, the above path expands to:

C:\Users\Mike\AppData\Roaming\twinBASIC

Prior to this change, the above subfolders–addins, locale, and themes–had to be in the same folder as the twinBASIC.exe application file.

That required manually copying and pasting these user customizations whenever you installed a new version of twinBASIC. Which, with a release cadence like twinBASIC's, resulted in a lot of unnecessary copying and pasting.

Having a dedicated folder to keep these items will make it more practical to start managing custom addin and theme files for the twinBASIC IDE.

Discord Chat Summary

^{* Auto-generated via Claude-3.5-Sonnet-200k on poe.com}

Here's the summary of the twinBASIC Discord general channel discussions from January 21-27, 2025:

Overview

This week's discussions centered around IDE interface improvements, bug fixes related to control behavior, and threading implementation details. Notable activity included fixes for Default/Cancel button functionality and UI element visibility in the dark theme. The community engaged in detailed technical discussions about COM threading models and their implementation in twinBASIC.

IDE Interface & Usability

The IDE received updates to scrollbar visibility and panel icons, with WaynePhillipsEA implementing codicon-based icons and adding drop-shadow effects for better visibility in dark themes
UI improvements included relocating the Settings access to a dedicated icon, though some users noted visibility concerns in dark theme
Community feedback highlighted the need for potential high-contrast themes for accessibility (suggested by mansellan)

Bug Fixes & Control Behavior

WaynePhillipsEA resolved a critical bug with Default/Cancel CommandButton behavior in BETA 671
Fixed an issue where scrollbar position indicators were invisible when MiniMap was visible (resolved in build 668)
Control array element unloading functionality was improved, with explicit support for Unload myCtlArrayElement syntax

Threading Implementation

Detailed technical discussion about twinBASIC's threading model, with wqweto confirming STA (Single-Threaded Apartment) implementation
Community members discussed COM marshalling approaches and VB6 threading compatibility
Significant discussion around proper thread initialization and COM object handling across threads

Development Tools & Testing

bclothier highlighted the need for regression testing capabilities
Community shared experiences with intellisense and syntax highlighting behaviors
Discussion of potential breaking changes in builds after BETA 624 due to internal architecture changes

Conclusion

The week showed significant progress in stabilizing the IDE interface and core control behaviors. The detailed technical discussions around threading models and COM implementation demonstrate the community's focus on enterprise-grade functionality. The development team's quick response to UI-related feedback highlights their commitment to user experience, while maintaining compatibility with existing VB6/COM paradigms.

Around the Web

Rubberduck 3: Re-scoped

It seems twinBASIC's continuing progress has led Mathieu Guindon–lead developer of the Rubberduck project–to rethink the direction of that project's next big release:

What about v3?
If things had gone smoothly, you would know by now. They obviously haven’t, and not much has moved on that front since last May or so. I’m not abandoning the project, but building an entire editor client and a language server is honestly much more than I can chew at the moment, for multiple reasons… twinBASIC is coming, and while a commercial offering, it’s a VB6/VBA language server and compiler, and it reckons the whole editor part is already a solved problem. Rubberduck 3.0 was going to reinvent that wheel, which would have been a huge distraction.

So RD3 is going to be re-scoped a bit: the planned VBIDE integration / add-in part remains of course, but instead of making an entire editor from scratch, we’ll integrate into an existing, modern one that’s already an extensible LSP (Language Server Protocol) client, much like Visual Studio Code (but no, it’s not going to be VS Code). This instantly knocks off (well, removes outright) a gigantic, milestone.

The part of the article that really caught my attention, though, was this little nugget (emphasis mine):

...the technology used for building Rubberduck has evolved a lot in the last decade, with much of it either deprecated, or on the brink of falling out of official long-term support from Microsoft...

I bet VBA will outlive .NET Framework 4.8.1 LTS, which is non-ironically very funny to me...

Changelog

Here are the updates from the past week. You can also find this information by visiting the GitHub twinBASIC Releases page.

Releases · WaynePhillipsEA/twinbasic

Contribute to WaynePhillipsEA/twinbasic development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHubWaynePhillipsEA

AI-Generated Changelog Summary

^{* Auto-generated via Claude-3.5-Sonnet, sorted in order of its opinion of "most impactful changes."}

IDE Enhancement: Added support for custom IDE addins, themes, and language packs through user-specific %APPDATA%\twinBASIC folders, expanding customization options
Form Control Improvements: Enhanced form control behaviors, including better handling of AutoRedraw, WM_FONT messages, and control array unloading operations to achieve closer VB6/VBA compatibility
Command Button Refinements: Fixed multiple CommandButton-related issues, including Default/Cancel button behaviors and interaction with non-native controls, improving form functionality

Note: This update primarily focused on bug fixes and compatibility improvements, with the IDE addon support being the major new feature addition.

WARNING: The following issues are present in BETA builds 623 - 671 (the latest build as of publication):

IMPORTANT: This is an interim/experimental release. It includes significant changes, so some instability is to be expected. [Editor's Note: Rolling back to BETA 622 may be necessary until the BETA 623+ version stabilizes or if any of the KNOWN ISSUES below affect your project.]
KNOWN ISSUE: UserControls from the ACTIVE project will not appear correctly in the form designer in this release (they are purposely disabled until next release). Packaged controls, such as VBCCR will work.
KNOWN ISSUE: Menus currently not appearing in MDI Forms (broken in this build)
KNOWN ISSUE: 'Scale*' properties are often not settable in the IDE property sheet (broken in this build)
KNOWN ISSUE: Setting Width/Height via the property sheet often does not work correctly (broken in this build)
KNOWN ISSUE: Controls are not being destroyed properly by the form designer, causing big memory leaks (broken in this build)
there are known memory leaks in these versions, so memory usage will be higher than at the Version 1.0 release

BETA 667

added: support for loading IDE addins, themes and language packs from %APPDATA%\twinBASIC folders (auto-created) [ fafalone, discord ]
fixed: tweaked the intellisense SPACE bar handling further to prevent invalid removal of spaces when typing quickly

BETA 668

fixed: AutoRedraw=True behaviours around reuse of cached bitmaps when width/height is changed [ XYplorer, private ]
fixed: controls added via Controls.Add() could spill over into the next load of the same form [ XYplorer, private ]
fixed: IDE monaco scrollbar was missing when CodeMinimapVisible theme property is on [ fafalone, discord ]

BETA 669

fixed: (regression in BETA 667) intellisense broken when the selected intellisense entry is changed with the arrow keys before acceptance
fixed: WM_GETFONT/WM_SETFONT handling for Forms/PictureBox/UCs [ XYplorer, private ]

BETA 670

fixed: position at which Form.Initialize event gets fired has been further refined to match VBx [ XYplorer, private ]
fixed: memory leak (UI objects) in form unloading routines involving menus [ XYplorer, private ]
fixed: Default/Cancel CommandButtons would not be triggered if the focused control was not a tB native control [ XYplorer, private ]
fixed: Unload myCtlArrayElement is now supported, where the element index is not passed in the statement but instead implied by the instance [ XYplorer, private ]

BETA 671

fixed: some issues with CommandButton.Default property not working as expected [ fafalone, discord ]