The bits you can't live without

[DickyP]

Similar to the recent 'What tools do you use for frontend development?' thread but more concerned with the nitty gritty of actually writing/developing the code itself.

What non-Access items do people use when creating databases that the can't do without?

(I'm ignoring other MS Office apps)

For me there are three things I can't live without.

- Scripting.FileSystemObject
- VBScript Regular Expressions.
- The Command Line extension to WinZip WZZIP.exe

There're not many but few, if any, of my Access Front-ends could exist without them.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

When I was still working with the U.S. Navy, I had to present performance data in a pleasing visual style that folks could understand. Which meant I had to use the chart library a lot. Now that I'm retired, the only thing I use regularly (in this case, with my genealogy project) is Adobe's library that lets me build PDFs from Excel and from Word.

 

[Josef P.]

• For manipulating PDF: PDFtk (pdflabs.com)
• Barcode fonts (Code 128, ...) + dlls to build BC128/GS1 Codes

 

[tvanstiphout]

Outlook Redemption for sending emails without Outlook security prompt.

 

[tvanstiphout]

- VBScript Regular Expressions.

VBScript deprecation: Timelines and next steps

Learn about the deprecation of Visual Basic Scripting edition.

techcommunity.microsoft.com

Let MSFT know how you feel.
I am not aware of a good replacement for the regex features of VBScript. Possibly a .NET component, possibly written using TwinBasic.

 

[GPGeorge]

VBScript deprecation: Timelines and next steps

Learn about the deprecation of Visual Basic Scripting edition.

techcommunity.microsoft.com

Let MSFT know how you feel.
I am not aware of a good replacement for the regex features of VBScript. Possibly a .NET component, possibly written using TwinBasic.

More comments on the planned deprecation of VB Scripting.

 

[DickyP]

Of course MS want to get rid of VBScript - it works! They seem to think the only users as corporate administrators where they are forcing users to use the dog's breakfast that is PowerShell - clumsy, verbose, slow ....... General theme of the latter appears to be why use one word when fourteen will do.

Given RegEx that it was added as a Cuckoo-in-nest by MS when people complained about there being no equivalent of JScript RegExp, there appears to be no reason why MS couldn't extract it and distribute it as a separate program.

If I can find any remnant of what I did in (many) years past I will investigate how I used SED with Shell to return RE results before VBScript first incorporated it..