I have been working pretty steadily on finishing version 4.0 of SwiftoDo Desktop. I feel pretty good about the app, in general. It is coded in Swift now, as opposed to Objective C, and has a much more mature, and hopefully easy to support, architecture.

It will be a massive upgrade from version 3. While I would like to charge for it, even for my current customers, I feel bad enough about drastically changing an app I sold, even if it is for the better, that I am strongly considering just releasing it as a free upgrade. That’s basically my plan for the next version of SwiftoDo on iOS, which will be based on this codebase as much as possible.

My day job has been super interesting lately. I have hundreds of data analysis work papers to write, and I coded some pretty sophisticated scripts to generate all the data analytics I need to run, review, and report on. If only the software I was using made it easier to generate my work papers. I still have days and days of work ahead of me writing all the work papers that document the process. I also re-learned today about VBA’s superannuated support for interfaces, polymorphism, and delegation, for another project I am working on.

My wife has been baking cookies for Purim this week, which is a lot of fun, but incredibly tempting to me, as I have been on a low-carb diet the past few weeks. I have to loose all the weight I gained over the past 14 months, due to stress- and grief-related overeating. I am using MyFitnessPal, once again, to track my eating. I have also been doing low-paced treadmill workouts in the evenings, though not every night. So far, my diet and exercise regime has gone really well, but sweets can still be tempting.

One new wrinkle in parenting that my family is dealing with is that my two-year-old son has recently developed separation anxiety, which is normal at his age. It has lead to a good deal of interrupted sleep late at night, when he wakes up and screams “Mommy!” My wife bears the brunt of it, though. He cries for her, but not for me. I am definitely second banana during these intermittent nighttime terrors.

I am neck-deep in Access and VBA coding at work, now that I am back from our annual training conference in Chicago.

I have been wrestling all day with an Access query with a ton of parameters that causes a crash when run via VBA, but works fine when run manually, which no one would ever do.

Here is a wrapper class to hide implementation details in Microsoft Access VBA projects: DAOQueryRunner.cls. DAOTemporaryTableController.cls relies on this.

This VBA class helps you work with temporary tables in Access VBA projects: DAOTemporaryTableController.cls. You may need to do so if you want to join using a subquery as criteria, which Access does not allow.

I decided to make use of GitHub Gists again. My first gist in several years is LoggedInUserName.bas: a VBA module to get logged in user name from the Windows API.

I got to be reminded today just how long VBA takes to run when used inside SQL Queries in Microsoft Access. I wish I could always use SQL Server, which is faster and better in every respect, but in my Company’s distributed environment, it’s always Access.

I am coding VBA and ripping CDs like it’s the year 2000 today.

I’m back to Access database work today. It looks like I will have to do even more Access work for exam procedure automation in the future, because the work will be portable and transferable to our clients that way. It’s kind of a bummer, though, because VBA is terrible. Native Python support in Office can’t come soon enough for me.

It looks like I will be doing some C# coding for work this month. That stuff is more interesting than the database stuff I do, and far more rewarding than the VBA stuff I have to do sometimes. I wish I could use Swift instead, though.

I wonder how many people still have to use VBA for Excel and Access automation at work, like I do. Googling for Office VBA how-tos feels like jumping in a time machine and going back 10 or 20 years. It is disappointing that Microsoft never added C#/.NET support to Office, but it is understandable.