Week in Review: May 25, 2024

Just Published

^{This section includes videos, articles, and (occasionally) open-source project updates from the past 7 days.}

Articles

• Philipp Stiefel (CodeKabinett)

  • How to hide the Taskbar Button of a window. - An excursion to the raw COM API with VBA.

• Maria Barnes (Business Data Bytes Newsletter)

  • AI at Work Is Here. Now Comes the Hard Part

• Jonathan Halder (Access JumpStart 2.0)

  • Refactoring in VBA with RubberDuck: Extract Interface part 2
  • Refactoring in VBA with RubberDuck: Extract Interface part 1
  • Refactoring in VBA with RubberDuck: Extract Method
  • Refactoring in VBA with RubberDuck: Rename a class
  • Wait, what’s that? “Clean Project”, courtesy of MZ-tools

• Daniel Pineault (DEVelopers HUT)

  • Why Does Microsoft Help Hackers?

• Colin Riddington (Isladogs on Access)

  • Extended File Properties (updated)
  • Progress Bar (updated)

• Mike Wolfe (NoLongerSet)

  • Will OfficeScripts Replace VBA?
  • Microsoft Announces End of RegEx Support for VBA
  • Three Reasons to Use Named Arguments in VBA
  • Invisible Instances of Office Applications: Who is to Blame?

Videos‌

• Access User Group Recordings (YouTube channel)

  • Learn how to chat with other Access developers on Discord (01:04:55): with Jim Dettman and Doug Yudovich

• Richard Rost (YouTube channel)

  • Excel Automation, Part 1 (16:37): How to Construct an Excel Sheet using VBA Automation from Microsoft Access
  • Excel Automation, Part 2 (18:00): How to Construct an Excel Sheet using VBA Automation from Microsoft Access, Part 2
  • USA First (21:20): USA First: How to Anchor One or More Items at the Top of a Combo Box in Microsoft Access
  • Find and Replace VBA (16:36): How to Find and Replace VBA Code in Microsoft Access
  • Open Date Picker On Load (18:49): How to Open the Date Picker for a Date Field when a Form Loads in Microsoft Access

• Nifty Access [Tony Hine, aka Uncle Gizmo] (YouTube channel)

  • ChatGPT-4o - MyChatGPT - Create YouTube Description (09:01)

New to Me

^{This section includes content I discovered this week that has been around for awhile.}

Nothing new this week.

Upcoming Access User Group Events

^{NOTE: Only English-language user group meetings with scheduled guest speakers or topics are listed.  For a complete list of upcoming events, visit the Access User Group event calendar.}

• May 28, 2024: Luke Chung- Data Analytics Tips and Techniques  (JUST ADDED) (previously scheduled presentation with George Young moved to November; see below)
• June 05, 2024: Colin Riddington - View & Edit Import/Export (IMEX) Data Task Specifications
• June 06, 2024: Ben Sacherich - Trouble-Shooting Access Applications  
• July 03, 2024: Olaf Nöhring - Getting Attention with style: An Improved, Enhanced Message Box / André Minhorst - Enhancing Access Forms
• July 04, 2024: John Colby - What is a Framework and Why Would Access Developers Use One?  
• August 7, 2024: Peter Poppe - Working with Treeviews
• August 27, 2024: Maria Barnes - Working with Microsoft Graph API from VBA
• September 04, 2024: Aleksander Wojtasz - Follow-up session on Interactive Gantt charts
• October 02, 2024: Alessandro Grimaldi - Animation with Style in Access
• November 06, 2024: Chris Arnold - Tips and Tricks for Continuous Forms
• November 26, 2024: George Young- Using Web APIs in Access  (NEW DATE)
• December 04, 2024: Adrian Bell - topic to be confirmed
• January 8, 2025: Philipp Stiefel - topic to be confirmed

Access Roadmap

There were no changes made to the roadmap between the last Week in Review (2024-05-18) and this one (2024-05-25).

The roadmap was last updated the week of May 11, 2024.  The development priorities were last updated at the German-language AEK conference on October 14, 2023.

Listed below is a snapshot of the official Access Roadmap.

"In Development", "Rolling Out", and "Launched" are Microsoft terms that I pulled straight from the public roadmap.

"Development Priorities" do not appear on the Access Roadmap.  Instead, they get updated from time to time in official Access blog posts or Access engineering team presentations.  I'll include a link to the source of the current development priorities as they get updated.

Development Priorities

The items listed below reflect Microsoft's order of priority and were published in the following article, Microsoft's Plans for Access in the Next 6 Months.

The items are listed in priority order according to Principal Engineering Manager Dale Rector.  The "Expected Benefit" of each feature is shown in italics after the description of the feature itself.

New priorities added since the previous set of priorities are shown in bold below.  Dropped priorities are struck through.

1. Continued Focus on Monthly Issue Fixes: (Monthly Issue Fix Blog) Improved product quality and reliability
2. Access becomes Large Address Aware: Removal of key customer error issue
3. Dataverse export improvements: Make it easier and faster for admins to migrate their data to Dataverse
4. Large monitor support for forms: Improved support of Access on the latest hardware
5. Modern Chart Improvements: Expanded support for the most popular chart types and options
6. SQL Editor Improvements: Significantly improved SQL query editing experience
7. Inconsistent Database Error Fix

Special thanks to Karl Donaubauer for posting the updated priorities at AccessForever.org.

In Development

• AUG 2024: Modern Chart Improvements
• SEP 2024: Integrate Monaco framework to improve SQL editor capabilities

Rolling Out

None.

Launched

• NOV 2023: Making 32-bit Access Large Address Aware (LAA)