Office 2019 released

Does anyone care?

It sounds like it is pretty much just a freeze of the current Office 365.

Which as we know contains xlSlow, so I assume that’s not getting its performance fixed, ever.

Has anyone got it?

Is it any good?

I only just picked up a cheap 2016, so I can’t see me ‘upgrading’ to 2019 any time soon, if ever.

I’m doing a lot of SQL Server at the moment which is a nice change, and SSIS, which is less nice. But still better than the Access I was doing. I like the Access visual designer (a bit), but the rubbish SQL editor is frustrating. In the end I had all the SQL in notepad++ (colour coded key words, indenting and new lines (MS Access team take note – how hard can it be?). And looking at the visual designer for the joins. Not a bad way of working actually…

And I have been messing with RubberduckVBA, it seems that’s currently the best way to indent other peoples shitty VBA, to make it at least semi-readable. (Smart Indenter seems to be pining for the fjords with a combo of lack of VB6 love at MS and increased ‘security’.). (I am sure I used to have a VBA version of that somewhere).

Anyway, another shout out for the developExcel conf in a few weeks. I have been busy messing with VSTO and Addin Express in preparation. It looks like there are going to be quite a few of us (100 ish I believe).

Rach from the 2013 conf

said she would come if her sock drawer was in order.

cheers

simon

 

Excel Developer Conference 18th October 2018 London

Woo Hoo

There is going to be a major, major Excel extensibility conference in that London on 18th October 2018. This is THE big one. All the big guns from the main Excel extensibility tools and frameworks are going to be there speaking.

There will no better time in your lifetime to hear from the horses mouth the how and why of ExcelDNA, PyXLL, XLL + and the new Excel javascript APIs. Also sessions covering Power Query and VSTO and Add-in Express.

This is a community driven event, driven by a desire to get the top minds in the Excel extensibility space together.

The Date? Thursday 18th October 2018

The Location? Microsoft Reactor, 70 Wilson St, London EC2A 2DB

More info here

Bookings here

See you there…

(please reblog… and if you do, and you are coming, let us know we will link to you on the sponsors page for helping to spread the word.)

cheers

simon

stackoverflow dev survey 2018

Is out now, here.

Its really interesting (if you are a developer, or interested in that sort of thing), loads of interesting details to avoid work

a few highlights

• Most Dreaded Platform – Sharepoint. ha ha ha ha hahahah
• 2nd most loved language – Kotlin. Agreed, this is the best language I have ever used.
• About 7% of devs are over 45 – maybe that’s because no one loves us…
• The UK has the highest proportion of independent devs. Germany the most part time.
• Functional languages pay the biggest bucks, especially in the US
• Javascript, the most common language, is also the worst paid.
• Most devs want to stay in dev or do a start up, few want to go into management.
• 50% of devs use a standing desk. ‘Have used once’ I could believe, but 50%? regularly? I’m slightly dubious on this one.
• Everyone is doing (fr)Agile or Scum.
• Most devs are using git and generally check-in a few times a day
• Mobile devs are almost the worst paid (another great career choice from me)

and finally, as per last year I think….

• Most dreaded Language – VB – any flavour!

Again

I must admit, although I use SO a lot, I don’t really participate. Most of the questions have better answers than I could provide and there are a few too many milk monitors.

I did have a poke around their job site for a while looking for remote jobs. There weren’t many and the search seemed a bit random. I got my latest job from Jobserve as usual, not remote, also as usual.

Have you got any SO insights?

cheers

simon

 

2018 UK Excel meet up/conference

Would anyone be interested in an Excel related conference in the UK this year?

Probably summer time, probably that London, probably one day (with pissups before and after hopefully). Cost – unclear, probably between 50 and 200 gbp depending on numbers and the type of event. (the room I hired in 2012 has gone up in price 1,000%!, for real – 10x more expensive now!!!)

It could be user focused or developer focused (state your preference)

It could be classic Excel, on stuff that works on every version for the past 15/20 years, or it could be on the new stuff in 2013 and 2016 (again state your preference)

No promises, but if there is enough interest a few of us might try to get something organised.

At this stage we are just trying to gauge interest (do we need a phone box or the Albert Hall?)

So if you might be interested please leave a comment. (no commitment (either way))

Venue suggestions welcome too.

ta muchly

 

Freelancer sites

I had a little sniff around the freelancer sites again, as I do from time to time…

Previously I have excluded rentacoder as they wanted to install some spyware on my pc so ‘clients’ could check what I was doing.

This time I actually registered on PeoplePerHour a few days ago. I just deactivated, over my short residence I was unable to decide if it was just a giant scam or not.

I realise that as the service provider we are the ‘stock’ of these sites but when the freelancer site has more, and more onerous, terms and conditions than an investment banking employment contract, shits messed up. right? Their T&Cs maybe aren’t quite as long as Apples, but run it close.

On Pph you have to pay to send a proposal to a someone offering a project. You get a few credits initially, but then you have to pay real cash money. The proposal needs firm costs, unless its an hourly rate project. So…

When the full and complete project description is:

“I need android app developing”

How much would you quote? Would you pay money (even toy money) to apply? (I might be doing something wrong here – 30 other people have already applied)

Then pph take 25% of the fee you quote the seller (upto 500 per month, a bit less after – but its hard to see how you could earn more than 500, tbh. Maybe that’s a skillset thing?). Most UK agencies take less than that these days, and they provide a bit more (just) than a contacts website.

Like RAC, Pph are obsessed with keeping all comms on site – of course, it would be so easy for people to connect there and then take the project offsite and keep their 25% cut. But the downside of that is as a supplier its hard to leverage non pph resources to differentiate. For example I can’t point people to codematic to suggest I know a bit about Excel dev. The fragility of this particular point I think, dooms these sites to long term failure. Certainly on a 25% cut.

If it was 5 or 10% and they were offering useful workflow and customer management tools then maybe, but at 25% the benefits of moving offsite will be irresistible for too many I think.

I had been advising people to use these sites to build up experience and a visible portfolio, but now, having done so I don’t think I would again.

Do you have suggestions for better freelancer sites?

Define better? supplier friendly, reasonable rates, sustainable process, significant work opportunities, reasonable T&Cs.

cheers

simon

Agile

If agile is so good, why do we need so many Agile coaches?

I see these roles advertised all the time and it makes me sad. Your development *process* is so involved you need a full time specialist just to show you how to do the *process*. Its mind numbing.

I have never seen a role for a RAD coach, waterfall coach, or an ad-hoc coach, or a slap-dash coach.

You have to be pretty sure your current process is beyond rubbish if you can justify a full-time equivalent overhead to coach your team in the new way. Will they really deliver so much better software so much faster than if you recruited another dev to your current process?

Plus the rates are amazing, nearly as good as SAP job-fer-lifing, another shitfest I aim to avoid.

I won’t mention scum master, or scam master because I just can’t bear to talk about scrum its so retarded. Well maybe it isn’t when properly applied to an appropriate project, I have seen more unicorns. Mind that’s another well paid zero value none job, of which there seems to be more and more.

Shame no one seems to want Rapid Application Development any more, even if it was sometime a bit more slow app dev. Hey ho.

Happy xmas if I can’t be arsed to post again before the big day. :-)

cheers

simon

Universal apps

That don’t include Office? What sort of universe is that? not any business universe that I have been in.

“Start building Universal Windows Platform apps”

That was the tag line from the MS Visual Studio site.

I finally managed to get their virtual machine working (it’s 40 Gb fully expanded, not 20). It has Visual Studio alright, but no Office. I am amazed that MS do not see Office as a development target, or at least not enough to put a copy on their development trial virtual machine. unbelievable.

I might chuck a 30 day Office 2010 trial on it, I think I have one on a pen drive somewhere. All the other stuff needs an MS account, which is just too much like going back in time.

In other news Android studio 3.0 is just out, with Kotlin as a first class language. All free, and easily accessible.

Anyone else had a play with the MS dev vm I mentioned a few days ago?

Well that was underwhelming

 

Bothered my arse to download their 20 gigs of pap, and lo it doesn’t work.

Unfortunately I have hit my buggering around limit now so the only outcome I can note is that I tried their Win 10 dev environment and it didn’t work. It was shit in fact. waste of my time. I’d like tuppence back for my bandwidth please…

I accept I have probably done something wrong but I didn’t see any instructions to ignore.

It’s now stuck on ‘importing windev eval’ been there for two hours. A fail.

 

Free Win 10 Developer virtual machine

Our good friends at Microsoft are giving away time limited virtual machines with Win 10 and VS2017 on board. They expire mid Jan so don’t get locked out.

Its for developers to get up to speed with the latest and greatest. However there is no mention of full fat Office. So I guess its not for ALL developers. Unless its a given that developers need a proper office suite not a mickey mouse online one.

I’ll download it and take a proper look as soon as I find a device with 20 gigs of free space. If you look first let us know if it has proper Office with VBA (If so I might delete a load of shite off here to get it up and running)

cheers

Is VBA a dead end ?

This topic came up on Excel-l, I got shouted down on there, so I thought I would elaborate on my views here. (its mainly an Excel view but I don’t think the other MS Office apps are much different.)

I see two sides to the VBA story – the technology and the career.

Technology wise a VBA solution is a dead end – it can’t be run on a server (officially), it can’t be run in a browser, it can’t be run in a high performance cluster, it can’t be run on mobile devices. This means it can’t be easily scaled if more users or geographies must be served. You can’t really even have multiple simultaneous users of an Excel VBA app. With the relentless march to cloud and mobile, VBA is left behind.

Of course MS won’t remove support for VBA, the world would fall apart, well the finance, pharma, and energy industries at a minimum. But the editor is pitiful by the standards of this century. It is testament to the work of those MS guys in the ’90’s that the debug Edit/continue is still better than nearly all mainstream IDEs. But its still out of date and hard to extend.

MS can’t invest in VBA because their strategy is .net/cloud/browser blah blah. They had the chance to fight on their strengths – rich client, but instead they tried to be google. And lost. Now we are all struggling with crap web sites in bloated browsers with slow Win3.11 style interactions from 1995.

VBA hasn’t suddenly become bad, its still very good at what it does, its just that we are often now looking for more from our solutions. More users, more device types, more threads, more whatever.

So its not dead but it is basically limited to single user apps on their individual workstations. But I am sure it will continue to work for a long time.

From a career point of view, what else is like VBA? nothing really, so expertise in VBA doesn’t easily lead onto anything else, hence its a bit of a dead end.

VBA is not really object oriented so it doesn’t lead to the sort of object based designs that C# and Java are suitable for. Its not functional so it doesn’t lead to F#/Scala.

Of course you can write VBA in classes, but lack of implementation inheritance hobbles your solution. By the same token you can write VB style ad-hoc procedural code in C#/VB.net, but you would be missing out on many of the elegant OO features of .net. You would struggle to implement most modern design patterns in VBA, and the latest CV must-have MVC is also all but impossible.

From a functional point of view (probably more useful than OO these days) VBA can’t treat functions as data smoothly (although CallByName does better than many languages). And a little toot of Application.Run can ease the friction too.

In Excel VBA especially we can get an awful long way without worrying about user interface/user experience or data structure. This is great for your current users (fast development/deployment) not so good for your career development – no other system is so well integrated as Excel/VBA. No worrying about Restful APIs, onClickListeners, Asynchronous callbacks, all very powerful, all generally avoided in VBA land.

If you love VBA, and why not, then continue on, you are probably adding untold business value with the work you are doing (and perhaps a little future maintenance pressure for someone). But I’m not sure it will take your development career too far, business career possibly but IMO it won’t help you much as a developer.

If you are doing VBA now and thinking of progressing to other development technologies then consider carefully how you will make your next steps. Adding Access and SQL to VBA is completely doable, adding modern scripting, web technologies or .net/Java is much tougher.

Getting into .net via VB.net is a possibility, but, I think it would be easier to go straight to C#, although the .net/Excel story is still, in 2017 very ugly.

ExcelDNA might be a good bet if you want to inject a bit of .net into your Excel life. I found this approach much more viable than VSTO infrastructure hell. Somebody somewhere is maintaining a lot of both that I developed. I bet the ExcelDNA maintainer is having more fun.

I also managed to blag my way into writing a load of custom Java on Essbase, that route probably isn’t open for many though.

Which led to my new focus on Android which is both challenging and rewarding. Although stay posted for news on that…

btw this is my 1,000th post on SOS, I assume WordPress will give me some superficial badge of honour, reward or ‘achievement unlocked’ bollocks, in the modern way.

cheers

simon