Access JumpStart 2.0 | Blog
A Rapid Development Framework for Microsoft Access
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Simple vs Clever
Sometimes, I can be too clever for myself. My future self that is. Fancy queries that do everything I need can be satisfying to write, but sometimes the tradeoff is complexity in the query that makes it difficult to understand and update as needed. Then if you have...
Simple Code Kata – Reverse a string
Here is another simple code kata produced for me by CoPilot. Thanks CoPilot! Task: We need a function that can reverse a given string. Examples (input → output): "hello" → "olleh" "VBA" → "ABV" "12345" → "54321" Ok, so first I will create the test cases and then...
What are code katas, and how can you use classes in real world scenarios?
I was looking around at some code katas today. Code katas are an exercise in coding that one can do on a repeated basis similar to practicing a move in martial arts. If you've seen the movie Karate Kid or any of it's sequels or remakes, you might remember "wax on, wax...
Are you stressed when you’re not coding?
Today was one of those days where my schedule decided to play a game of "let's see how many curveballs we can throw." First up, tackling my monthly bills took way longer than expected. Navigating new payment systems felt like trying to decode ancient hieroglyphics,...
Using a Null Object pattern in VBA Polymorphic classes
If you have an interface class object and you implement several types of the object, what can you do when your object has no handler? That's where the Null Object pattern comes into play. Here's an example of how you could implement the Null Object Design Pattern in...
Why use code katas?
I enjoyed doing yesterday's code kata. See that here: https://www.accessjumpstart.com/super-simple-code-kata/ So the goal was to write a function to convert an integer into a string and had 3 different situations to test. The majority of the code in yesterday's...
Version Control Systems allow quick pivots in design
I am pivoting directions on a project. After producing what the customer asked for, he realized it was making the whole system more complicated than he wanted, but may want to revisit it in the future. Thankfully, since I use versioning, it was trivial to move back to...
SQL Server – don’t forget your indexes!
As I was working in my dev copy of the client's database today, I was using SQL Server quite a bit via SQL Server Management Studio SSMS. I noticed some slower performance on a couple of features I added multiple months ago that utilized new tables. So as I usually...
Quoting big blocks of SQL with MZ-Tools
The last few days I've been adding lots of VBA code for updating views and tables to put new fields into my SQL Server backend. I've been using the MZ-Tools regular expression search and replace tool to do some heavy lifting for quoting paragraphs of SQL generated...
Super Simple Code Kata
Here is a starter code kata... This is practically nothing in VBA since types get auto-converted, but how might you do this taking a variable of type integer and write a function to convert it to a string type. Here is the code kata requirements along with tests we...
Running parallel SQL server databases for testing
Today I spent much of my coding time on building a second database to run parallel copies of a new feature so that I could make sure the overlapping areas of output were remaining the same from the original process to the modified process that could do more. Although...
Logic errors – the ugly step cousin of compilation and run time errors
Today's work was to fix logic errors in my application. The problem is that overlapping data in files that normally deletes the older data and replaces it with the newer data is replacing all the older data even though it is earlier than what appears in the file....
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