twinBASIC Update: March 13, 2022

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  I boldly predicted that twinBASIC (along with the Monaco editor) would replace VBA and its outdated development environment by 2025.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:

• twinBASIC Installation Guide
• GitHub Issue Tracker (report bugs)
• twinBASIC Discord Server (chat about the project)

Highlights

Progress on the New IDE

Wayne continued working on the twinBASIC IDE this week.  He released another sneak peek over on GitHub yesterday.

Progress includes:

• Support for unsaved projects (like VB6)
• Semantic highlighting
• CodeLens
• IntelliSense
• Most other compiler services

Wayne has not yet released the IDE publicly, but he provided another animated gif showing the current state of development.  Watch for an initial alpha release in the next week or two (based on Wayne's comments in the Discord server).

Around the Web

Access DevCon Vienna 2022 - April 28 & 29

Access DevCon Vienna, the largest English-speaking Access conference in the world, is being held virtually again this year.  

In addition to my hourlong presentation on "Understanding COM," I will also be giving a 10-15 minute update on twinBASIC's progress since last year.  Given the timeframe, I'll need to keep the talk very focused on the highlights.  Here's my very rough outline (likely to change):

• Status update on my "Current Limitations" slide from the 2021 presentation
  - Generic error descriptions
  - No Like operator
  - Debug.Print syntax not supported
  - Missing built-in file operations
• Status update on "Future Plans" slide from the 2021 presentation
  - GUI framework: in progress
  - Git VS Code integration: pending
  - Multi-threading: pending
  - 64-bit support: available to twinBASIC Pro subscribers
  - Cross-platform support: pending
• Changes from last year
  - Updated licensing model
  - Custom IDE in addition to VS Code support
• Roadmap Update
• 3 Ways to Stay Updated:
  - GitHub Project
  - Discord Server
  - This Weekly Update (subscribe! for email delivery)
• "My Bold Prediction" update

As I said, this outline is likely to change between now and next month.  If there is anything you think should be added (or taken away), let me know in the comments below.

Changelog

Here are the updates from the past week.  You can also find this information by installing the twinBASIC VS Code extension and clicking on the Changelog tab of the extension page:

No changes to the core twinBASIC code, as development continues on the new IDE.