In VitoshAcademy I try to be on the edge of VBA technologies. Unfortunately, this is not that difficult, as far as VBA is really like the hated child of Microsoft – it works quite a lot and it does a pretty good job with the whole Office package, but it has not been updated since 2003 or something like this. I mean, open the Visual Basic Editor, then open Visual Studio 2015 and see the differences between these two.
So, back to the point of the article now – I am always happy, when I find someone, who is investing his time and skills to make the life of the VBA developers better.
Pretty much, some years ago, when I was programming an MS Access based ERP solution for a multibillion company (not joking here!), me and the other programmer used to write on one Access instance. Then, at the end of the day (or the code-sprint), I was telling him in which module I have written my new code and he was uniting it with the general solution. Thus, years after, when I heard that git exists I was impressed and somehow jealous, that there was no git for VBA (because VBA lives in the MS Office application). The solution, I am presenting today, solves one of these problems – it takes the values from all MS Access objects (Tables, Forms, Reports, etc) and it saves them as .def files. Then, these .def files can be imported and exported around the MS Access database.
Pretty much, to test it, I have created the following two tables – Countries and Towns. One to many relationship between them.
What I tried to do, was to add some values in these two tables and then export the tables as .def files. This is recorded with a screencast:
Of course, as you see from the naming of the tool, it has something to do with SVN (subversion), thus it is integrated with Git. Other version control systems can be used as well.
If you are interested in the tool and you are too lazy to google it – this is its site – dev2dev.de. The documentation is only in German, but the User Interface is well built and has an English version as well.