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Rubberduck – COM add-in that enables IDE features in the Visual Basic Editor

rubberduckvba.com

21–23 of 23 posts

Re: Rubberduck – COM add-in that enables IDE features in the Visual Basic Editor

#21
post #6

> "Bring the VBE into this century!" This actually gave me goosebumps... Are there many modern use-cases for Visual Basic? All I can think of is horrible scripting code for Excel, Word and AutoCAD

Anyone that inherits any sort of legacy MS Office workflow almost always needs to interact with VBA. Access, Excel, and Word workflows use it excessively as it's the only language you can use for manipulating things "inside" the file. Sure, you can use something like DAO/ADO/ODBC to perform CRUD type operations on the file from some other program. But if you want to, say, attach some code to an event in an Access form, you're stuck with VBA. So a tool like Rubberduck is useful to people developing for legacy Office related code, especially since VBE by default isn't super great. Access seems to be dying out but Excel is still flourishing.

Re: Rubberduck – COM add-in that enables IDE features in the Visual Basic Editor

#22
post #15
post #3

I had to actually google "Visual Basic Editor" to find out why it was a thing people are still using in this century, and found out that it's the editor for VBA macros in MS-Office applications. So "Visual Basic Editor" is a bit of a misnomer...

It's a bit reductive to call it "the editor for VBA macros", it's like calling Visual Studio a "template editor" because you get a set of template files when you create a new project. The purpose of VBE is to build applications, it's an IDE. Add-ins like Rubberduck are actually very useful in extending the capabilities of VBE and there are still millions of people using VBA every day to solve business problems.

I can confirm, I am one of them. My current project is ~13k LOC and ~50 classes. It's the only way to get solutions built quickly without a mammoth of bureaucracy involved.

Re: Rubberduck – COM add-in that enables IDE features in the Visual Basic Editor

#23

I use VB6 all the time. Need to quickly get some custom serial port thingy written? VB6. Want to make a quick window that hosts 4 embedded VLC COM instances to watch RTSP camera streams? VB6. My craziest use case out in the field was: Wall mounting a spare mouse and soldering two wires to the left button inside, running a wire back to the office with the computer playing pandora and then writing a quick app to turn d…

I have used vb6 professionally for 20+ years. It is still a really powerful tool for getting things done.
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