January 2019 – Rubberduck News

Unlike quite a number of Rubberduck releases, this time we’re not boasting a thousand commits though: we’re looking at well under 300 changes, but if the last you’ve seen of Rubberduck was 2.3.0 or prior, …trying this release you’ll quickly realize why we originally wanted to release it around Christmas.

So, here’s your belated Christmas gift from the Rubberduck dev team!

VBE Project References: CURED!

You may have seen the Introducing the Reference Explorer announcement post last autumn – well, the new feature is now field-tested, works beautifully, instinctively, and is ready for prime time. It’s a beauty!

The add/remove references dialog has seen a number of enhancements since its pre-release: thanks everyone for your constructive feedback!

Quickly locate any type library by name and/or description.

Pin your favorite references, and Rubberduck will keep them handy for all your VBA/VB6 projects.

You’ll never want to use the vanilla-VBE references dialog again!

If you’ve been following the Rubberduck project for quite some time, you may remember something about using annotations together with inspections and quick-fixes to document the presence of module & member attributes. You may also remember when & why the idea was dropped. Keeping in tradition with including new inspections every release… Surprise, it’s coming back!

German, French, and Czech translations have been updated, a number of bugs were fixed in a few inspections, the Code Explorer has seen a number of subtle enhancements, and WPF binding leaks are all but gone.

Code Explorer Enhancements

Adding the Reference Explorer made a perfect opportunity to revisit the Code Explorer toolwindow – our signature navigation feature. Behold, the new Code Explorer:

The new ‘Sync with code pane’ toolbar button (the left/right arrows icon) selects the treeview node closest to the current code pane selection.

There’s a new ‘Library References’ node that shows your project’s library dependencies …whether they’re in use or not:

Find all references can now be used to locate all uses of a given type library – including the built-in standard libraries! Note that rendering lots of search results in a toolwindow will require confirmation if there are too many results to display.

The project reference nodes get new icons:

Classes with a VB_PredeclaredID attribute set to True now have their own icon too (and their names now say (Predeclared) explicitly), and class modules marked with an @Interface annotation now appear with an “interface” icon, like IGameStrategy here:

Annotations & Attributes

They’re back, and this time it does work, and it’s another game changer: Rubberduck users no longer need to export any code file to modify module & member attributes!

Module & Member Annotations

At module level, the @ModuleDescription annotation can be given a string argument that controls the value of the module’s VB_Description attribute; the @Exposed annotation controls the value of the VB_Exposed attribute; the presence of a @PredeclaredId annotation signals a VB_PredeclaredId attribute with a value of True.

At member level, @Description annotations can be given a string argument that controls the value of the member’s VB_Description attribute.

Through inspections, Rubberduck is now able to warn about attributes that don’t have a corresponding annotation, and annotations that don’t have a corresponding attributes. Look for inspection results under the “Rubberduck Opportunities” category.

v2.4.x

The months to come will see further enhancements in several areas; there are several pull requests lined up already – stay tuned, and keep up with the pre-release builds by watching releases on GitHub!

You’re writing a rather large VBA/VB6 project, and you’re starting to have a sizable amount of passing unit tests. Did you know you can copy the test results to the clipboard with a single click?

…and then paste them onto a new worksheet and turn it into a data table:

If you’re not sure what to do next, you can even let Excel give you ideas – you’ll find the Recommended Charts button under the Insert Ribbon tab:

With the count of method by component chart, we can see what test modules have more test methods; the sum of duration by component chart can show us which test modules take the longer to execute – or we could average it across test categories, or archive test results and later aggregate them… and then use this data to performance-profile problematic test scenarios.

Similarly, the “Copy to Clipboard” button from the Code Explorer can be used to export a table into Excel, and using the recommended pivot tables feature, we can get a detailed breakdown of the project – for example count of names by declaration type creates a pivot table that lists all Rubberduck declaration types, so you can easily know how many line labels your project has, or how many Declare Function imports are used:

With a little bit of filtering and creativity, we can regroup all Constant, Function, PropertyGet and Variable declarations by return type, and easily identify, say, everything that returns a Variant:

The possibilities are practically endless: the data could be timestamped and exported to some Access or SQL Server database, to feed some dashboard or report showing how a project grows over time.

How would you analyze your VBA projects? What code metrics would you like to be able to review and pivot like this? Share your ideas, or implement them, and send a pull request our way!

Month: January 2019

Rubberduck v2.4.0