…and it rocks.
The past few months have been tough. We were facing some serious ANTLR grammar bugs, and our identifier resolver had even more serious bugs, which meant false positives in code inspections, a rename refactoring that wouldn’t always rename all references, and a StackOverflowException if you were unlucky… which blew up Rubberduck, the VBE, and the Office host app with it, without warning.
That’s why 1.3 remained a “pre-release”.
Rubberduck 1.4 has none of these issues. Oh, our ANTLR grammar is still far from perfect (line numbers, and “precompiler” #IF statements come to mind) – but a number of bugs were fixed, and the resolver was completely rewritten. It’s not as perfect as we’d like it to be, but it correctly resolved everything we threw at it, without a single exception.
So, what’s so cool about it?
#Refactor
Extract Method has been around since version 1.2, and Rename was pre-released (albeit with some issues) with 1.3; Rubberduck 1.4 introduces two new refactorings:
- Reorder Parameters in a procedure, and automatically adjust all call sites.
- Remove Parameters from a procedure’s signature, and automatically adjust all call sites.
Rename can be used from the Project Explorer, Code Pane or Form Designer context menus, as well as from the Code Explorer to rename a project, a component (form, module, class), a procedure, variable, line label, …anything. This completely eliminates all excuses to keep meaningless identifiers in your code.
#Navigate
The Code Explorer was already a nice feature in 1.2, but Rubberduck 1.4 takes navigation to a whole new level.
- Find Symbol lets you search for anything – and go to its declaration.
- Find all references displays all call sites of any identifier.
- Go to implementation lets you navigate implementations of an interface or interface members. Rubberduck considers any class referenced by an Implements statement as an interface.
One cool thing is that we’ve created declarations for pretty much everything in the Standard VBA library, so you can use find all references to list all usages of, say, MsgBox, or Err.Raise.
#Git
That’s right. We’ve talked about it for a while. Well, it’s here. Integrated source control, right there in the VBE. Commit, push, pull, merge, branch, to and from local or remote repositories on GitHub.
And so much more…
If you’ve never used a previous version of Rubberduck, now is the time.
Every VBA programmer needs a Rubberduck.
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