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A Rapid Development Framework for Microsoft Access
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A Day in The Life
Ever wonder what a developer running a sole proprietorship does? Here's a little snapshot of my life this week. This week i've been up to a couple of things: I've updated a client to provide a button to their navigation to open a particular query. Continued to work on...
TransferSpreadsheet Not Cutting It? I Use This VBA Routine Instead
A few years ago I wrote a routine to copy an Access query or table to a block of Excel cells because I was having issues with DoCmd.TransferSpreadsheet not being able to always do what I needed. I found that copying the entire recordset to an array variable and then...
Avoiding Exclusive Access in Access: My Strategy for Seamless Updates
Today I had a request from a customer with a database used for What If scenarios to allow him to do either do updates from the main tables consistently or to boot all other users out of their front ends so that he can do an update when one is required. The system is...
Access Tip: How to Break into Your Code at Exactly the Right Moment
Today I was debugging Access and was working in some complex code that iterated over a large number of records. I wanted to stop at a particular record and run through it step by step. The record could be identified by using the RS variable which represented a DAO...
TDD in Access: Separating Logic from Forms for Cleaner Tests
I decided to do some tests today, but didn't even get to writing any yet. The issue was that I had a function tied to a button click event event inside a form which referenced various controls on the form. Normally, it's easy to refactor this by simply putting a...
Access Date Filtering: Between vs. >= and < Explained
When you need to specify date ranges in Access, remember the following helpful tips: By default, a date includes the time of midnight 00:00:00. So #1/1/2025# is equivalent to the expression #1/1/2025 00:00:00# or #1/1/2025 12:00:00 AM#. When you use Between, it always...
What Happens When You Press Ctrl-A in an Access Text Box?
Do you know what happens if you are in an Access text box and press Ctrl-A? You might expect all the text in it to be selected like a text box on a web page or in a Word document. But it doesn't. If you are in a text box on a form in the normal single form view it...
My VS Code Setup Saga: Copilot, Cogent, and a Few Surprises
I did more experimentation with Visual Studio Code today and the free Copilot Github and Cogent extensions. Copilot Github interfaces with the Github site Copilot feature which offers a free version. I also got the Cogent extension which acts as an agent for Copilot...
Adventures in AI: My Quest for Smarter Development Tools
Today I spent the time I would have taken to write an article to start reviewing the 8th light's TDD starter's guide: https://8thlight.com/insights/getting-started-tdd-practical-guide I'm excited to practice more TDD. But the lion's share of time was spent on...
Access Report Trick: How to Tell If You’re Running as a Subreport
I was doing more complex report work today in Access. I had need to determine if my sub-report on another sub-report was running as a subreport or not. There is the case in development where I'm just testing it, but when it is running as a sub-report it needs to check...
When Your Access Power Users Want Subdatasheets—Here’s the Fix
Most of my customers that I build Access apps for have not been Access users. In other words, they tend to know very little about tables or queries or reports, design view, VBA modules and macros. This tends to make my job easier in that I don't have to be concerned...
Pair Programming Dreams and TDD Goals: A Personal Dev Update
I've been listening to a podcast called Mob Mentality on Spotify. I just get the audio there but I think there's a YouTube channel. I'm still interested in mob and pair programming, even though I petered out when trying to organize one. (Sorry Peter [petered out], but...
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