VBA Rubberducking

12:58 AM

Ok you.likely have an email from dillon buchanan something requesting access.

Mathieu Guindon

1:14 AM

done

Tweeting Duck

1:53 AM

Glad to see that Steven van Deursen and @ploeh are releasing a 2nd edition of Dependency Injection in .NET. Coming this October: https://www.amazon.com/dp/161729473X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_5wlvBbYNV2QR9 The first edition has withstood the test of time, but I can see opportunities for updates and newer code samples.

Tweeted by svenaelterman on July 22, 2018 at 4:59 PM

3:27 AM

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] bclothier created wiki page .NET to COM Conversion Documentation

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] bclothier edited wiki page .NET to COM Conversion Documentation

@Duga noticed that those articles didn't have a new home (at least I couldn't find and since the information seems useful, decided best to get it archived and linked @JstInCase

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] bclothier edited wiki page .NET to COM Conversion Documentation

@anyone is there any chance of reviewing the mammoth USCI PR? I'm half inclined to just merge it anyway since we will need to adapt it further whe we start unifying the duplicate expression engines?

#4127?

3:43 AM

Yes

USCI was an acronym we came up becaus ethe name....

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] bclothier edited wiki page _Sidebar

4:07 AM

I need to find the type coersion stuff to check if Boolean is handled correctly. Combining bitwise Booleans with numbers in VBA is nothing like .NET.

4:26 AM

I suspect that will end up needing the unified expression engine using the functions from oleaut32, which is a whle another PR (or rather PRs)

Is VBA's bool defined the same way as oleaut?

I suspect that oleaut uses the c++ TRUE and FALSE macros.

There is a ton of weirdness around Boolean comparisons in VBA. Consider for example:

?-1 / 2 < False
True
?-1 / 2 > True
True

Bitwise is even worse, given that True will coerce to a number with all the bits set:

?CInt(True Xor 42)
-43

Or:

?42 - 43 = True
True
?42 - 44 = True
False

Or:

?CBool(1) = True
True
?1 = True
False

No, the point is that you need to perfomr the conversion using oleaut32 functions then perform comparison, as per the vba spec

(and i believe some of the operations for comparison or arithmeric are also defined in the oleaut32

You also have to do the correct coercion based on the RHS and LHS though - that's language specific.

e.g.the function VarAdd function docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/desktop/api/…

AIUI, the type coercion are specified in the VBA spec, so we need to follow that

and currently neither implementation follow it to the letter

using the conversion functions in oleaut32 should help esure that our type coecion is faithful

Agreed. I'll have to check the VarBoolFrom* functions though - I'd just assumed that the VBA numeric representation of True was implementation specific.

4:43 AM

Hmm not sure. There is VARIANT_BOOL and IIRC, that is what VB uses

msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc237864.aspx

Hmmm... that would imply that it's an OLE thing as opposed to a VBA thing. Which makes me curious how many libraries actually follow that spec.

TBH I always though that VB is constrainted to conform to OLE, as it builds on it.

OK, it's spec'ed down to the level of VARENUM:

VT_BOOL A Boolean value. True is -1 and false is 0.

morning / evening

The main reason I'm curious is that we have an ODBC driver that won't write boolean fields with Variants because somebody used a > 0 test somewhere as a truthiness flag.

4:50 AM

VARIANT_BOOL is indeed what VBA uses internally

@WaynePhillipsEA morning / evening

And you also can see there is a VARIANT_BOOL boolVal field in the VARIANT structure as well

RE ODBC, that's a problem outside the OLE automation entirely.

ODBC conforms to the C convention of 1 = true, 0 = false and it also has its own set of data types, so you're converting everything all again over

Not from where I'm looking at it from... :-P

in fact, if you stuff a bad value (say the Windows/C version of TRUE) into a VBA Boolean, VBA won't blink initially, and you'll notice that the internals of VBA pretty much always operate on a Boolean as if it were an Integer (short). There are no real boolean operators

so then logic like 'Not SomeBoolean' don't do as you might expect

I suspect the implementation is just a convenient way to ensure that anyNumber & True = True.

4:54 AM

you can simulate this with any Win API that returns a BOOL

FWIW, I never compare something as true, but rather not false. It's the only safe way that works everywhere.

me too... that's just the C boy in me

@WaynePhillipsEA did you see the earlier message regarding weird case of pointer giving AV when looking at typelib?

just catching up yes

I gravitate toward letting the compiler hash it out i.e. if (x & y)

4:58 AM

@Comintern you're not calling the relevant release member too early by any chance?

@this That was an issue with combining the VARARGs and PARAMARGs into a single base class.

@Comintern i usually think of expression such as If foo Then as equalivant to If Not (foo = False) Then

I'm intending on abandoning that PR and finding a different way to do lazy name resolution.

so that performance gain was unsafe?

@this Access violation = null performance.

5:01 AM

you should only be getting a bad pointer if the content has been destroyed too early

The new implementation will likely still be a big performance gain - there are just some holes due the not being able to fully walk the tlb.

Evaluating multiple typelibs concurrently makes it incredibly difficult to do caching, especially when VARARGs or PARAMARGs refer to imported libraries.

For example, a vast majority of interfaces inherit from IDispatch in stdole, so that interface will get processed n times where n is every interface that is loaded before stdole.IDispatch.

Clarifying --- is the thread per typelib or per typeinfo

Per typelib.

5:18 AM

Given that the typelib has no thread safety, i would think it's only safe as long you stay within that lib, and leave the resolution of types in imported lib in a dedicated thread?

There's no cross-threaded access between the instances.

The caching issue is that If say, Excel imports MSO, it doesn't make sense to fully expand MSO when it encounters it because I'd just be processing the same tlb twice.

I already have to do that for interfaces (at least until the thread processing the interface from it's native library finishes it).

The implication of that is that I can't build parent-child relationships and have a distinct interface set - it winds up with duplicate objects.

For our current purposes, that's fine (if inefficient), but if we ever want to tag them with accesses or anything like that, they'll need to be merged or reconciled after all the threads return.

TTGTB

night!

6:10 AM

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] ThunderFrame added label PR-Status: Review Requested to pull request #4225: Adds Add Predeclared Class Module Command

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] ThunderFrame created pull request #4225: Adds Add Predeclared Class Module Command to merge ThunderFrame/Rubberduck/next into rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck/next

> This is a WIP, as I've yet to test with VB6, so do not merge. It only occurred to me afterwards that VB6 handles imports differently, so I'll probably need to push the import module from text methods into the IVbComponents implementations. Closes #4183 This PR is only for adding new Predeclared Classes. I'm undecided about how to go about implementing toggling the attribute: a dedicated UI, like the (somewhat poor) one in VB6, or waiting for AvalonEdit codepanes, and editing in place....

The implementation is aware of whether the host is Microsoft Access, and if it is, adds an Option Compare Database statement. It is unaware of the VBE's Require Variable Declaration setting, and will always add Option Explicit. It also adds a VB_EXT attribute for identifying the creator of the module.

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] ThunderFrame added label PR-Status: WIP to pull request #4225: Adds Add Predeclared Class Module Command

6:23 AM

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] build for commit a04219fa on unknown branch: AppVeyor build succeeded

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] [codecov[bot]](github.com/apps/codecov) created comment on pull request #4225: Adds Add Predeclared Class Module Command

> # [Codecov](https://codecov.io/gh/rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck/pull/4225?src=pr&el=h1) Report
> Merging [#4225](https://codecov.io/gh/rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck/pull/4225?src=pr&el=desc) into [next](https://codecov.io/gh/rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck/commit/0941bdcd6abbda99c9acad5f52da3ffbc7f66bc0?src=pr&el=desc) will **decrease** coverage by `0.08%`.
> The diff coverage is `1.85%`.

```diff
@@ Coverage Diff @@
## next #4225 +/- ##
========================

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] build for commit a04219fa on unknown branch: 52.15% (target 0%)

10:45 AM

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] Greedquest opened issue #4226: Is a RD API on the cards?

> I've made a little project for exporting code modules/projects as single self extracting files. It occured to me that it would be nice if I could access Rubberduck'sknowledge of `'@Folder()` annotations to export only files within a certain folder. Or more generally, there are a number of bits of RD that I could use in various projects.

Are there any plans to expose some of Rubberduck in an API? I heard somewhere about thoughts of a unit testing api for use in CI, but I'm on about a Rubberd

11:06 AM

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] Greedquest edited issue #4226: Is a RD API on the cards?

12:17 PM

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] ThunderFrame opened issue #4227: Add UI for editing Class/Form Attributes

> With the attributes-as-annotations approach seemingly dead in the water, Rubberduck needs a UI for inspecting and editing VB_Attributes. In VBA:

- Standard Modules and Document Modules only have their Name attributes exposed.
- Class modules expose their name and instancing attributes in the Properties Window, but not their PredeclaredId attribute.
- UserForms expose their Name attribute, but not their Instancing attribute. Nor do they expose their PredeclaredId attribute, but a UserForm

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] ThunderFrame added label enhancement to issue #4227: Add UI for editing Class/Form Attributes

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] ThunderFrame added label discussion to issue #4227: Add UI for editing Class/Form Attributes

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] ThunderFrame added label feature-code-explorer to issue #4227: Add UI for editing Class/Form Attributes

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] ThunderFrame added label module-and-procedure-attributes to issue #4227: Add UI for editing Class/Form Attributes

12:34 PM

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] bclothier created comment on issue #4226: Is a RD API on the cards?

> Since PR #3975, it is already available but relatively untested. Note that it's a separate library, so you must reference the dll "RubberduckAPI.XXX.tlb", where the "XXX" corresponds to the bitness you are using. IIRC, you need to use a pre-release as it hasn't been included in the last green release(?).

There are a number of limitations; the main one being that the parser class is indepdent of the actual parser used by the RD main plugin, meaning you can't see same state but you can run th

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] bclothier created comment on issue #4227: Add UI for editing Class/Form Attributes

> I definitely am not fan of VB6's propensity to use popups gratuitously. So that approach for me is no-go. It would be only appropriate for performing mass edits.

AvalonEdit seems to be a way off but even if it is here today, a dediccated toolwindow seems to me the most useful.

I would probably start with supporting editing only an indviviudal component then look at a popup UI for mass editing after, reusing the commands created to support those operations.

[rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck] ThunderFrame created comment on issue #4227: Add UI for editing Class/Form Attributes

> What if it worked like editing the properties for a selection of multiple controls on a UserForm, where only the shared properties are editable?

Peter M Taylor

12:56 PM

@this any good to you documentation wise? github.com/OfficeDev/VBA-content

1:13 PM

This seems to be the offline version of the documentation on VBA and various housts' OM, which are still maintained by Microsoft online. Thus, those aren't in dnager of being "misplaced". Furthermore, those are more aimed at the end users of programming in VBA, rather than those developing a COM addin. Thanks for the link!

I'm about to go on a massive rant about "security questions" being 100% public information.

First/last name of my oldest niece. How hard is that to figure out?

Name of my teacher in 3rd grade. Seriously?

Name of best man at my wedding. Now that's just trolling.

What street did I live on in 3rd grade.

@Hosch250 Pro-tip: Your answers can be anything.

Yeah.

^^ i live on my answers. As long i lie consistently it works mostly. But they'd be doing us a favor if they allowed us to define the question rather than selecting from predefined Or netter yet, dont use it at all

But dont worry! They will be soon improving the security by asking for a photo fo you! How could anyone possibly fake that?!? </sarcasm>

1:28 PM

lol

"For purposes of password recovery, please draw a picture of yourself here:"

M.Doerner

For which contexts can there be attributes in VBA? Only modules and procedures, right?

1:43 PM

AFAIK, yes. VB6 may have more hiding places, however.

@M.Doerner nope, variables can have attributes too

See 1683

Til

@Comintern I have a fake date of birth for a website once, then forgot the fake DOB and the password. The password reset procedure requires me to get the DOB correct, so now I can't reset the password. If I call them, and ask for a reset email, they require the DOB. The login is tied to my android account, so I can no longer use their service, or pay them any money for it. Stupid telephone company.

Oddly, my son has their app, and he gets the football streamed for free due to a poorly configured cookie on his phone, so long as he doesn't login, so it's not like their security is too notch to begin with.

In other news.... No, I'm not getting married.... I bought a house, with a pool!

2

1:59 PM

@ThunderFrame Nice.

Of course, having a pool would be useless to me, since I can't swim :)

@Hosch250 yeah, swimming is kind of an essential skill in Australia. They teach it in primary schools. Most of the population lives within 50km of a beach, lake or river, and the warmer climate means that many houses have pools.

@ThunderFrame LOL, I'm in MN.

We've almost got more water than land over here.

Except in the southern/western part of the state.

I'm two blocks from a large lake, and still don't know how.

But it's frozen water for half the year?

Yeah.

Never gets below 40°F here.