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Whenever I see code I want to use in Access, I adapt it to my style so I can understand it better later. But working with a code sharing tool like this feels different. I see it more like importing APIs for things I don't want to deal with myself. In that sense, I care less about how it was...

@Pat Hartman I'm sorry, but that sounds a lot like a golden hammer, the one size fits all mentality. Forms can be bound or unbound in Access, so that is "THE Access way", by definition.

Absolutely, open source code faces these challenges by default, the important part is that it will let you advance much faster without a lot of bureaucracy and review upfront. That's why it should rely on the feedback of the community. Eventually, the best packages will rise to the top, the bad...

Now that I think about it, it doesn't have to be just for Access. It could cover the entire Office suite and anything else that runs VBA. With help from the Excel community, even though the VBA crowd can be pretty toxic, just like the Access crowd, we'd have a better shot at getting it adopted.

As for how to make it viable, one good starting point would be to reach out to the owners and admins of the different forums and communities where developers already hang out. We could ask for their help to promote the tool and make it visible to as many developers as possible. Even just having...

Or this

Now, since there are a lot of repos hanging out there in the wild, we could integrate them if their license allows it and then let the user claim their authority over it.

I forgot a key aspect to this, we HAVE TO integrate some form of AI in many of the steps. Luckily for us, there's plenty of LLM models out there to help with that. We could, ideally, let the LLM have some context of our environment and let it control it. That would really be the GOAT.

There are a lot of differences between what I'm talking about here and what's currently available today. What we have right now forces us to go hunting for what we really need. You have to dig through forums, blog posts, random GitHub gists, or old articles just to find a simple utility or...

Here's how I envision it. It has three main parts: The centralized registry of packages. The developer or developers who create and publish the package. The developer who will be using the package. Scenario: On a typical day, a developer is working on a form and realizes that a particular...

Yes, that’s exactly what I was referring to. Being able to find and mindlessly integrate stuff without a paywall and with an active community of people improving it and keeping it alive would definitely bring some life to this. @Josef P. I would share some time for that thread, if you're...

It would be nice if we could have all those classes and modules made by others in one place where we can simply select and bring into our development environment. Sort of like npm for NodeJS or nugget within .Net, you would not even need to classify them, you would just search for them and with...

You can use the unbound form, nothing bad is going to happen to your business if you want to show a read-only piece of data. You had to tweak the thing for that to occur, period. The unbound form does not need that extra pattern to be maintained. It laser focuses on presenting the data in a...

And that's a great thing. All other development kits are using frameworks for everything, saving thousands of hours, but nothing is really out there yet for every day Access development, save for a few classes and modules here and there to handle very specific scenarios.

Ideally, the debugger should be your go-to tool when a bug occurs, unless you're following a strict test-driven development approach. It sounds like you might have been expecting a more automated solution that can catch all scenarios. I've come across some tools that aim to do that, vbWatch, for...

I'll consider it. I'm glad you could find some use in it. The devs gave us some handy stuff, it's just not talked about much, but it's there. On top of writing your expressions, you can explore what the contents of an entire object looks like throughout the procedure and add all kinds of...

Oh yeah, but your form's bound, so you gotta disable stuff here, add guards there, fix this, fix that. Not exactly a high IQ move for a simple read-only feature. Honestly, it's like bringing a tank to a pillow fight. You don't need all that. Believe me. Look, you've seen bad implementations...

You could use the Watch window, I use that thing all the time. 1. Add a watch 2. Write an expression such as Not myObj Is Nothing 3. Choose a procedure where myObj should be Nothing 4. Choose a module 5. Choose Break When Value Is True 6. Run your code, use your class or form or whatever and, if...

I jumped in because there was a lot of esoteric speculation going on. The tools are available for everyone to use when figuring out when you need to set objects to "nothing". It’s certainly not about memorizing specific cases. That’s just my take on it, anyway, and, to clarify, apologies if I...

You guys wouldn't have this discussion if you used more debugging tools than just the immediate window