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Why do people still use VBA?

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Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#161

Post by crispyambulance »

toolslive wrote: post #82
throwaway154 wrote: post #2

Corps have a dev environment sitting right in Excel that doesn't need special (management, management's management, adding to a registrar of projects, budgeting or project manager assigned, etc) approval for non-stock software. The stack's Excel, plus Sharepoint if you're really looking for a networked data store that also has a web interface. From that end-user direction, solutions emerge. And they're in VBA.

I've seen the following at least twice: some department manager (marketeers typically have a nack for this) needs something, can't or won't bother the development team and starts off with "how difficult can it be" and before you know it they've written a few hundred lines of VBA, which serves their needs. But then, the next phase starts: that scripts gets copied over (because Jim wanted to run it too) and modified (J…

> Now it's a 1500 line kludge and they want to unload it, ie pass it over to development for maintenance.

... and THAT should be considered a GOOD THING!

It means you've got a tried and true business case for the application, the requirements capture has already been done, you've got an instant user-base and a very clear bar to jump over. Of course, the application must be able to outperform the old application in every way, or else questions will be raised.

I think it's important to point out that the inception of these excel VBA monstrosities is innocent and pragmatic. An SME has a job to do, they're doing their job, but have a need for a custom tool to help do their job.

It is ALMOST NEVER the case that they should drop what they're doing and engage a SW development team to go through a lengthy VERY expensive process with uncertain outcomes-- all the while still having to do their job. It's much more pragmatic, in many cases, to tackle the problem piece by piece, as need arises, with little spreadsheets, scripts and little databases.

I think complaining about VBA monstrosities is wrong-headed. They should be, in a way, embraced as a starting point for devs-- hopefully BEFORE they become mission-critical to the company, however.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#162

Post by orthoxerox »

anthk wrote: post #131
orthoxerox wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows doesn't ship with C# out of the box. It ships with the runtime for .NET Framework 4.8, but not with the SDK.

I think it does since the Windows XP days, at least a CLI based compiler/interpreter.

Would you look at that, it does!

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\ has both MSBuild.exe and csc.exe, but only for .NET Framework up to 4.0. I was under the impression that 4.8 was installed on Win 10 machines via Windows Update.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#163

Post by TrackerFF »

I had to develop a simple CRUD interface for some of our analysts.

The immediate problems I faced was:

1) The analysts wanted every (CRUD) step to happen within excel - excel was indeed going to be their interface, so I needed something which I could launch from within excel.

2) The IT department refused me to grant command line access

3) The IT department refused me to install non-approved dev tools. To get them approved, would potentially take months.

4) The DB admins weren't too keen on letting me add a new DB to the existing Oracle DB. The IT department weren't too keen on me doing my own DB (see step 3)

Hell, just getting new add-ins to excel requires me to BEG the IT folks. And if I'm lucky, the add-ins will just suddenly appear. Will it take a day? a week? a month? Who knows.

So keeping all those things in mind, my only real alternative was VBA.

In the end I managed to get some permatemp solution up and running, which the analysts use once every two weeks.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#164

Post by Aloha »

jalapenos wrote: post #39
Aloha wrote: post #25

The real answer as pointed out in this document is simple - IT Security and Administrative policy in non-technology companies trends towards restriction and justification rather than permissiveness. I work in a role that develops air gapped custom communications system, my title is engineer - and to that end I have a broad cross domain knowledge - including traditional system administration tasks. I have to go thru s…

Have you considered not working in that role? And I know that feeling. I had a job once where if you wanted to install a text editor, not only did you need permission, but someone from IT dept had to come to your desk and install it themselves. And this was at an ordinary mid-sized private company manufacturing nothing special. All you can do is starve these companies of support, by leaving as soon as you discover su…

We as a group are considering work to rule.

But, no, because I otherwise love my job, also where would I go?

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#165

Post by lucidguppy »

WTF!?

Everyone needs to seriously look at DDD again. You want a product?

- Small team composed of a few developers, one or two SMEs, one or two DEVOPS.

- SMEs teach the devs the domain language. Explain requirements in gherkin language or equivalent.

- Devops hand hold the developers to get it into production. (Devops guy can probably be split between 2-3 teams).

Many SMEs want to work their problem, not code. You're helping them.

VBA is anti-technology. There is no version control, there are no tests, automated integration tests? HAH!

*PS: "You build it you own it" Is wrong. You need a small "meta-programming" team that makes sure the teams have the tools they need to own production without their brains exploding. Perhaps these meta-programming teams can be split among a few corporations - as you don't really need them there all the time.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#166

Post by mschuster91 »

jstanley wrote: post #140
TeMPOraL wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point it's not even explicit - it's an implicit decision of most companies, and even OSS projects, because it became part of the "common wisdom" of computing, part of the zeitgeist. This is where the idea of "a computer as a bicycle for the mind" died.

On the topic of "computers as public transport for the mind"... A project I work on has some processes that I need to run that can only be initiated through the Azure DevOps Pipeline interface, and these need a "worker agent" on a VM or something, and there is only one worker agent, and some of the jobs take half an hour or more. So the effective outcome is that despite every member of the team having a full multi-ta…

> And the secret-hiding doesn't even really work, because I can freely commit code to personal branches on the repository that the Pipeline runs from, and I can run the Pipeline on whatever branch I want, so I could commit a program that prints out the secrets. Ah, but Microsoft has thought of this: if any of the secrets appears in the output, they get replaced with "**".

Github Actions at least allows restricting secrets to be exposed only to specific branches, and in Gitlab you can enforce that pipeline steps using critical secrets can only run in protected branches, so you'd need to fool a maintainer with a malware-laden pipeline change in a merge request first.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#167

Post by alisonatwork »

orthoxerox wrote: post #119
13of40 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows ships with VBScript, JScript, CMD, C#, and PowerShell right out of the box. I recall interviewing a college guy around 2018, and he tried to educate me about how Windows doesn't have a good command line / scripting / automation solution beyond command.com. I think I still said "hire" because he had other talents, but damn.

Windows doesn't ship with C# out of the box. It ships with the runtime for .NET Framework 4.8, but not with the SDK.

I'm not much of a PowerShell wiz so apologies if this is hideous, but I stuck this in my profile.ps1 a few years ago:

  $Csc = gci "$env:windir\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\*\csc.exe" -ea silent | select -last 1
  if ($Csc) {
    Set-Alias -Name csc -Value $Csc
    $Csc = $null
  }
It makes the csc that comes with .NET available out of the box on pretty much any Windows system. I'm not sure how good it is at building serious programs, but it's good enough for little static void Main thingys. I doubt it's useful for the same demographic that would be using VBA, though.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#168

Post by arethuza »

sanitycheck wrote: post #145
j-a-a-p wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VBA is the ultimate agile programming language. The company's IT aka Bureaucracy Department is stuck with Scrum, Squads and what not. And meanwhile in the other departments people are just getting things done with Excel/VBA. Nothing has changed. In the last century this also happened and it was called islands of automation. In my bubble back then it was considered a good strategy, let departments first play around, a…

I was talking about this with a friend the other week... I think what IT depts really need to do is let people go crazy with Excel/VBA, but write a script to monitor activity on xls files on the network over the long term. If there's an xls which has been in regular use for more than 18 months, and it contains macros, then it can be assumed it performs some important role and should be properly documented and checked…

"let people go crazy with Excel/VBA"

Many years ago a company I worked for used to send out a spreadsheet to its suppliers which they would complete with the products they offered and then when it was received back there was a button in the spreadsheet that would automatically upload the data to a central database.

When I first saw this I was curious how it worked and did a bit of investigation - turns out there was VBA behind the button that established the database connection and uploaded the data. What was amusing was that the user had hardcoded the database connection string including username and password. Of course this wouldn't work outside of the firewall - but I'd be careful about letting people get too crazy.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#169

Post by mschuster91 »

baz00 wrote: post #91
throwaway154 wrote: post #2

Corps have a dev environment sitting right in Excel that doesn't need special (management, management's management, adding to a registrar of projects, budgeting or project manager assigned, etc) approval for non-stock software. The stack's Excel, plus Sharepoint if you're really looking for a networked data store that also has a web interface. From that end-user direction, solutions emerge. And they're in VBA.

Worth also pointing out that sometimes when you're in a corporate dystopian hell hole do not expect to be able to actually request or install software on your device. What is there is what you have and trying to get it changed is an exercise in taking on the bureaucracy. It's not worth it. Many people have tried and failed. Back in the dark ages, we had a horrible reporting engine in Word VBA that pulled report defin…

> Worth also pointing out that sometimes when you're in a corporate dystopian hell hole do not expect to be able to actually request or install software on your device.

The problem is, cybersecurity insurances nowadays have that limitation as mandatory for coverage... and for good reason.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#170

Post by usrbinbash »

menotyou wrote: post #109

Let's face it: IT is the bureaucracy department of modern times which can keep itself 95% busy with self inflicted problems and has 5% service orientation. Processes are opaque for outsiders and typically not helpful. I really had to lough when I read the following description of the IBM BPM but this sums up a good part of the issue: "...while IBM BPM does come with a REST API, this REST API is borderline useless to…

I can find bad examples of how things work in basically every department I chose if I look long enough. Are there IT-Managed things that border on insanity? Oh yes. Are these a good excuse to build a shadow IT? No, they are not.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not bothered at all when a couple analysts get together and hack away at their own little tools in VBA. Kudos to them for getting into the spirit of things, and maybe they will understand my day to day better as a result.

What does bother me, is when these analysts suddenly expect my systems architecture to somehow accomodate their private projects in whatever capacity. When I ask for documentation (there isn't any), an architectural overview (nope), or even access to the repo for that abomination (access to a what now?).

Because, why shouldn't their spreadsheet inject data into my processing pipeline? Why shouldn't I write a controller that accomodates whatever tidbits of REST they bothered to watch half a youtube video about? When suddenly I get asked this in a meeting: "What do you mean we need authentication? Why does IT always have to make things so complicated?!?".

So yeah, please, people should absolutely build their VBA, lowcode or whatever tools. I do the same thing, the only difference is, I call them shellscripts, and they live in git repo.

But same as I don't let my CLI tools lose on the production server, I won't let it happen with things that have never even been through one code review.

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