My Software

My software

I write programs for a living but not many of them would be useful to the outside world even if I were able to give away the code; however I do have a few odds and ends that might be useful

Some notes on ideas for programs will be found in ProposedPrograms.

Visual Basic Mode for Emacs

This is a mode for Emacs for editing and formatting Visual Basic 6 code. I suppose it should work for all versions of VB from 4 onwards but I have only tested it on VB6 source code. It might not work on source for VB.NET because of changes to the syntax regarding property functions; I'll have to take a look at it when I have some VB.NET code to work with.

I didn't write all of this but I did fix it up to work in the latest version of Emacs (20.5). Unfortunately there seems to be a problem using it with 21.2.1, I keep getting minor errors but if I load the files .elc before trying to use them instead of relying on the autoload mechanism they work fine.

There are just two files: one to load a VBP or VBG file and another to load and fontify a Visual Basic source file (.cls, .bas, .frm):

visual-basic-mode.el

This is the main file, it fontifies and formats Visual Basic code.

vbp-mode.el

Loads a project file and then all of the source files mentioned within it.

Acknowledgements

As mentioned earlier, I didn't write the original visual-basic-mode.el I just maintain it and occasionally enhance it. Here I say thank you to those who have helped.

Fred White

Wrote the original, a much greater achievement than my additions.

Dave Love

of Daresbury Laboratory in the UK, very helpful and knowledgeable about Emacs Lisp.

Christian Lemburg

Complained that it didn't work in XEmacs but didn't stop there, he fixed it and tracked me down to get the fix put back into the source. That's what open source is all about. Unfortunately the reason it didn't work was a difference in the way Emacs and XEmacs treat strings and characters (I think) so if I apply his patch then it won't work in Emacs, I have to try to figure out how to make it adapt itself to the two environments.

Visual Basic Mode for Visual Basic

When I discovered the regular expression classes of VBA it dawned on me that I could make a VB version of the formatting feature of the mode. The core of the job was simply to recreate all the regular expressions and package them in a class called Pretty.

This can be used as a formatting engine in an Add-In (already created and in use) or a standalone formatter (in progress). You can download the files from here:

Engine

pretty.cls, point.cls, pretty.bas

Add-In

prettyoptions.frm, prettyoptions.frx, connect.dsr, connect.dca, modmain.bas, prettyaddin.vbp

Standalone Formatter

Not ready yet.