VBA triumph
Aug. 27th, 2007 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stephbgI have built an application! OK, it was in VBA for Excel, but it's got a GUI, responds to human interaction, communicates with other systems and is even a little bit robust. Tomorrow it grows some more and I'll make it talk to a bunch of other things.
This rather puts a hole in the short version of my job description that I do "a bit of everything to do with software development, except write code". Well, I've been drawing "code" pictures (no, not UML, but actual executable XempleX graphical models) for a while now, but this is (im)proper nasty text-only code, written without the benefit of either a book or a suitable human in the vicinity.
Yes, there's the internet in all its glory, but there are precious few free online resources for basic VBA GUI design. I know generally how to program (should do by now), but I lack the specific vocabulary for this language. Unfortunately Microsoft's VBA Help depends upon you knowing the answer in advance. Charming.
It strikes me as somewhat Wrong that it took several minutes of hunting to try to find a suitable command to close a custom dialog. Quit? Close? Exit? It was so obvious no online Help was any Help. I eventually took the linguistic route: if "Show" was what you needed to display the thing, then perhaps "Hide" would make it go away. So it did. And that was my day.
WooHoo!
This rather puts a hole in the short version of my job description that I do "a bit of everything to do with software development, except write code". Well, I've been drawing "code" pictures (no, not UML, but actual executable XempleX graphical models) for a while now, but this is (im)proper nasty text-only code, written without the benefit of either a book or a suitable human in the vicinity.
Yes, there's the internet in all its glory, but there are precious few free online resources for basic VBA GUI design. I know generally how to program (should do by now), but I lack the specific vocabulary for this language. Unfortunately Microsoft's VBA Help depends upon you knowing the answer in advance. Charming.
It strikes me as somewhat Wrong that it took several minutes of hunting to try to find a suitable command to close a custom dialog. Quit? Close? Exit? It was so obvious no online Help was any Help. I eventually took the linguistic route: if "Show" was what you needed to display the thing, then perhaps "Hide" would make it go away. So it did. And that was my day.
WooHoo!
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no subject
Date: 2007-08-27 10:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-27 12:08 pm (UTC)