VBA Rubberducking

Duga

00:02

RELOAD!

[Cardshifter/Cardshifter] 2 issue comments.

[Cardshifter/cardshifter.github.io] 2 opened issues.

[Cardshifter/HTML-Client] 4 commits. 55 additions. 18 deletions.

[ckuhn203/Rubberduck] 12 commits. 23136 additions. 7224 deletions.

[Hosch250/VSDiagnostics] 9 commits. 1230 additions. 120 deletions.

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] 2 issue comments.

[Vannevelj/VSDiagnostics] 14 commits. 2 opened issues. 3 closed issues. 2866 additions. 187 deletions.

[Vannevelj/VSDiagnostics] 3 commits. 1 opened issue. 1 issue comment. 1985 additions. 939 deletions.

Stack Exchange

02:39

The Codeless Code: Case 202: Anchors Aweigh

posted on August 15, 2015

After he had been with the Temple for several weeks, the new abbot Ruh Cheen called up young master Zjing on his monitor. “I’ve been studying all the finicky little details of how software gets built here,” said Ruh Cheen. “Now, I don’t want to ruffle any feathers, but I’ve come up with a simple way to make things go much faster and smoother for everyone.” “That is... surprising,” said Zji…

Mat's Mug

05:12

I'm scared. I'm hitting weird issues that I don't know how to fix. "Add test module" works A1 from the DI'd menu, but seems to run twice from the toolwindow's commandbar. Same with "run all tests" and every single button on that goddamn toolstrip.

I'm this close to give up and rewrite the whole thing

O.M.Y.

07:33

Sorry I was away. I found this thread on an MS forum:

answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2016-macword/…

It seems MS is officially moving away from VBA to javascript but plans to keep a degree of legacy support for VBA for a while (the figure mentioned was "20 years", yeah right). They have opted for js because it means they will not have to create runtimes for androids et al.

Vogel612

This also means there's going to be a helluva lot of companies stuck on Office < 16

O.M.Y.

07:49

Frankly as much as I love what can be done with VBA, in recent years I became a fan of using Ruby with the Win32OLE library. For more on this see the following links:

dapaz.net/blog/blog/2013/01/21/ms-office-and-ruby

rubyonwindows.blogspot.com/2007/03/…

Sadly there is not yet a Win64OLE library for Ruby (except JRuby says they have one but I have not tried it).

Duga

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] davgit starred us

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] davgit forked us into davgit/Rubberduck

O.M.Y.

But as far as MS walking away from VBA it seems to me that is a major mistake. The primary value of VBA was its ease of use for millions, while still having enough power for the specialists like you guys.

RubberDuck

09:39

@O.M.Y. I heard a rumor at a conference that they're working internally to create a VBA -> MSIL compiler. Don't know how true it is, but if so, I would expect VBA to be around for a very long time.

O.M.Y.

13:11

@RubberDuck I have no doubt the old (Bill Gates) MS would do something like that: Create a proprietary converter that would change proprietary VBA into proprietary MSIL which would require a proprietary runtime to use with proprietary Office. The new (post Gates) MS I'm not so sure would.

One thing that MS seems to be overlooking is that this could seriously open the gates wide for OpenOffice. My experience (talking with IT guidance committees in many companies) is that only the sheer volume of "native" VBA applications keeps businesses from adopting that free/opensource alternative to the expensive per-seat MS Office purchase.

Jeroen Vannevel

13:27

I assume you mean LibreOffice rather than OpenOffice?

O.M.Y.

@JeroenVannevel I believe LibreOffice is a fork from OpenOffice. I still use MS Office (2013) but I do watch the opensource world.

Jeroen Vannevel

Yeah, they forked because OpenOffice came with a restrictive license when it was taken over by Oracle

Now LibreOffice is miles ahead of OpenOffice apparently

RubberDuck

It is a fork, but.. That ^

cheezsteak

@JeroenVannevel oracle gave open office to apache so now they are about the same but have different UIs

RubberDuck

LibreOffice is a much nicer UX IMO.

Jeroen Vannevel

13:31

> Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth in 2011 blamed The Document Foundation for destroying OpenOffice.org because it did not license code under Oracle's Contributor License Agreement

RubberDuck

Easier to use.

Jeroen Vannevel

LibreOffice

LibreOffice is a free and open source office suite, developed by The Document Foundation. It was forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010, which was an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite comprises programs for word processing, the creation and editing of spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams and drawings, working with databases, and composing mathematical formulae. LibreOffice uses the international ISO/IEC standard OpenDocument file format as its native format to save documents for all of its applications (as do its OpenOffice.org cousins Apache OpenOffice and NeoOffice...

O.M.Y.

The fact is that VBA is the super glue that keeps the gates shut against the "barbarians" of competition. The fact that Sally Secretary can all by her lonesome automate that highly repetitive task with a few clicks is pure ambrosia to the common worker bees. If MSO365 and MSO16+ drop that uber-accessible functionality they will be inviting the barbarians inside the city wall.

And if VBA programmers are now expected to switch to other languages that is problematic in so many ways I cannot even begin to list.

In that link I provided above (answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2016-macword/…) it says:

"If you want to make money, get on board: [Javascript] is where the opportunity is going to be.

In the meantime: VBA will be around for a few years yet. However if you want to develop in VBA, you will need to equip your Mac with a Windows virtual machine and a copy of Windows Office (and/or Visual Studio) in order to get a full development environment."

But then in reply it also says:

"Most existing macros of any consequence won't work without serious modifications. Many simply can't be modified to work. Welcome to sandboxing. Welcome to dumbed-down computing. Even correctly written macros will not run and you can't troubleshoot them because the VB Editor provided is a sham (again IMHO). You can't do anything at all with userforms in the new VBE."

and: "why Javascript will never be as useful as VBA. In order to work on all the devices, only a tiny subset of the object models of Word, Excel and PowerPoint will be available programmatically. The heavy lifting will be done server-side on web servers, not in the client "

O.M.Y.

13:50

I started this thread in this chatroom with the following question:

I am curious what the latest is on the issue with VBA not working with Office 365. Is there any solution in sight?

I would have thought that StackExchange VBA folks would be fully aware of the oncoming storm but (respectfully) it seems not. That is scarey because if experts like you guys are not seeing this who is?

cheezsteak

14:49

Are you writing an article or something?

VBA days have been numbered for a long time. It hasn't been updated since 1998. I'm only upset that Javascript is the replacement instead or something like ruby or python, it just means all those macros will be even harder to read.

Hosch250

15:23

@Mat'sMug @RubberDuck I just installed Visio 2013. Would you like me to include the PIA in RD?

I can get 2010 if you want that, but you'll have to wait til the end of this semester unless my class uses it because I'd rather not mess things up at this point.

Mat's Mug

16:04

@Hosch250 sure, bring 'em! ...do you know if Visio supports Application.Run?

Hosch250

I have no idea.

I can find out.

Mat's Mug

RD 2.0 will have unit tests working in Outlook. If Visio doesn't have Application.Run I'll put it on the same "model" as Outlook, all we need to do is figure out how Visio's Application runs VBA code from a VBE add-in.

"all we need to do" -- as if it were easy ;-)

Hosch250

The rest of the Office PIA's are 12.0.0.0

I have 14.0.0.0 and 15.0.0.0 for Visio.

I included 14.0.0.0, but I can get 12.0.0.0 sometime later if you want.

Mat's Mug

that would be ideal :)

RubberDuck

@O.M.Y. I seriously think you're panicking over nothing. MS has been trying to kill VBA for years. They haven't succeeded yet.

Hosch250

16:11

Verdict - does not support Run.

RubberDuck

Besides, most corporate offices are still running 2007, 2010 at best. Plenty of time for MS to work out their latest failure before anyone has to switch over.

So, since everyone is here, any idea when we introduced IRubberduckCodePaneFactory?

I need to get ninject fixed up, the source control window won't open because it's not registered.

Hosch250

@RubberDuck Yeah.

I did that.

RubberDuck

Do you remember which release?

Hosch250

I was trying to unit test something, and I had to do that to get our extensions registered.

Umm, is it even released yet?

I think it was after our last release.

RubberDuck

Yeah. It's broken in master. I tried hotfixing an issue with SC.

Hosch250

16:14

Jul 11 at 22:11, by Hosch250

364 errors in 28 files :(

IIRC, we released on the 8th, and that is the 11th...

@RubberDuck It was working last I checked, must be something with Ninject.

RubberDuck

Hmm... maybe I got something jacked up on my local branch. Will try removing reforking when I get home.

Hosch250

Now, are you interested in supporting Project too?

I can get that as well.

Mat's Mug

the whole repo is broken AFAICT

(sorry that isn't a positive and productive comment)

Hosch250

Just don't try to release, everything will be alright.

Mat's Mug

haha ...yeah.... we're far from release-ready

I think next "big" release will just be 2.0

BTW we're approaching 400 downloads on the latest

RubberDuck

16:18

Okay. That gives me time to sort this mess out.

github.com/libgit2/libgit2sharp/issues/1163

github.com/libgit2/libgit2sharp/pull/1171

github.com/libgit2/libgit2sharp/issues/1173

Relevant reading. There's some issues with the LibGit2Sharp library.

Duga

[Hosch250/Rubberduck] Hosch250 pushed commit 92817640 to next: Add Visio PIA

[Hosch250/Rubberduck] yuominae pushed commit c14ebb4d to next

Create RubberduckUI.jp.resx

Japanese translation of the Rubberduck.UI.resx file.

[Hosch250/Rubberduck] yuominae pushed commit f55d5136 to next

Update RubberduckUI.jp.resx

Added the Language_JP key which I had forgotten.

[Hosch250/Rubberduck] retailcoder pushed commit f9946b44 to next

Merge pull request #733 from yuominae/next

Create RubberduckUI.jp.resx

[Hosch250/Rubberduck] Hosch250 pushed commit f4bfea20 to next: Merge branch 'next' of github.com/rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck into next

Hosch250

@Mat'sMug OK, the PIA is in my Next branch.

Mat's Mug

that's good news.. so RD 2.0 will have unit tests working in Excel, Word, Access, PowerPoint, ....Outlook, and Visio.

Hosch250

16:35

Would you like Project too?

Mat's Mug

sure

Hosch250

OK, sometime tomorrow.

Hosch250

17:04

@Mat'sMug @RubberDuck Which version of Project should I download to get the 12.0.0.0 PIA?

Mat's Mug

2010 IIRC

Hosch250

I can't connect to the server right now, try again later.

Hosch250

22:46

I'm downloading Visio 2010 and Project 2010.

Hosch250

23:08

Download finished.

And, I don't have a product key, so I can't install :(

Mat's Mug

23:36

but you have the PIA's!

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