twinBASIC Update: May 7, 2023

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  I boldly predicted that twinBASIC (along with the Monaco editor) would replace VBA and its outdated development environment by 2025.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

Project Status Update

Over in Discord, someone noted that the last bug release was April 16th and wondered when new bug fix releases would start appearing again.  

Wayne chimed in with an update:

May 7, 2023
So... Last week didn't exactly go to plan.   Later this coming week we'll definitely have a new release

Around the Web

AccessAppHook Library

Ben Clothier published a twinBASIC library to simulate application-level Access events by intercepting certain key presses.

GitHub - bclothier/AccessAppHook: twinBASIC library to simulate application-level events.

twinBASIC library to simulate application-level events. - GitHub - bclothier/AccessAppHook: twinBASIC library to simulate application-level events.

GitHubbclothier

For an example of this code in action, check out his latest pull request over at Adam Waller's Access version control add-in:

Introduce automatic export on save by bclothier · Pull Request #397 · joyfullservice/msaccess-vcs-integration

This PR enables the ability to automatically export any objects upon saving. Some demonstration....Simple demo of exporting after saving a query via keyboard (Ctrl + S): SimpleS...

GitHubjoyfullservice

I haven't had a chance to dig into it yet, but I'm hoping I can either use Ben's add-in–or at least some of his techniques–to address a similar problem I ran into several years ago:

Event raised when closing or opening a CodePane

I’m writing a VBE/VBIDE add-in and I have a tool window that changes based on the open CodePane objects. Is there an event I can monitor when a code pane is added or removed from the CodePanes

Stack Overflowmwolfe02

reddit: Proper Language That's Close to VBA

User Stildawn posed the following question in the VBA subreddit:

[W]hat language out there is as similar to VBA as possible, and how does it handle GUI things like userforms, like I know I can write my project in VBA in something like Access or even Excel and use userforms for the GUI, but I want a standalone free end product this time round.

twinBASIC came up as a good alternative in multiple responses.

twinBasic - It fully supports VBA syntax, and adds ontop of it with many missing features
- Sancarn

twinBASIC is a good alternative; it's the same language but with numerous modern features and additional syntax.
- fafalone

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

No releases this week.