SA: Interview with Book Author Alessandro Grimaldi: Access on Steroids
About Alessandro Grimaldi:
I started developing in 1982. I met VBA in 1998, and since then it’s become my primary and favorite developing tool. For several years I consulted for the World Food Programme, a United Nations agency for whom I worked in Afghanistan, North Korea, Ethiopia, and Italy. I also spent a few months in Vienna, Austria, for another UN agency, and since 2014 I live in Frankfurt, Germany, where I worked for five years at the ECB, the European Central Bank. My main task in all these places was to create Office applications at some level, from simple automation tools to corporate level, multiuser, distributed software.
About the Book
In these 190 pages you’ll find:
– A collection of my own “good” practices to write code
– An introduction to VBA classes
– The so called “bit-field” technique
– How to realize a drag and drop engine
– How to create a “sliding form” effect
– How to build a scrollable timeline
Starting from scratch, you’ll be able to create classes you can easily embed in your projects to spice up your Access applications.
The package also includes all the source code, fully commented.
Links in the video:
https://payhip.com/VBAShop/collection...
https://www.alessandrogrimaldi.com/
Table of Contents:
00:00 - Introduction and Intro Access with SQL Server Access User Group and Juan Soto intro
01:06 - Invitation io join Access User Groups
01:21 - Introduction to Alessandro Grimaldi, VBA developer and book author
02:25 - Why a book on Access now?
07:43 - Shortcomings of traditional Access static interfaces
08:51 - Version 1 of the Graphical Interface
09:31 - Early Proof of Concept with movable ships, cargoes and destinations
10:54 - Picture Rotator for visual searches
11:34 - Sad failures happen
12:43 - The Book Structure and content
14:00 - Chapter One: Alessandro's Coding Standards
16:22 - Chapter Two: Intro to VBA classes
16:45 - VBA Classes in Graphical Interface design
17:22 - Classes are essential in graphical interfaces
19:17 - Classes change everything!
19:52 - Chapter Three: The juicy part - Dynamic interfaces
20:32 - Drag and drop images
20:54 - The basic code for draggable images
21:55 - Scale up with arrays
23:18 - Ghost Label technique
24:03 - Sliding Door technique
25:11 - Presence vector, or bit field, technique
25:24 - The bit-field technique or presence vector in detail
25:42 - Technique is based on the binary form of a number
26:25 - Bit field technique eliminates junction table overhead
26:37 - Requires a single byte (bit) field in one table
26:47 - No queries are involved
26:52 - A single byte field in a table at work
27:26 - Bit field technique is limited to longs
28:35 - The scrollable timeline
28:47 - Exploring the scrollable timeline
30:06 - Timeline and bitfield together
30:19 - Bit field with scrolling timeline
31:52 - Can the timeline object span more than 31 days? Yes!
35:31 - Dynamic interfaces illustrate the power of the bit field technique
36:14 - The hard part of using this technique is the logic behind it
36:23 - The key to the method is understanding rationale
37:01 - Classes in the book can be imported into other projects and implemented
37:18 - The book package includes all source code
37:28 - Q & A Session
40:04 - The greatest challenge in writing the book was writing in a foreign language
41:12 - Where to buy the book (links in the video description)
53:54 - Illustrates the real power of VBA in Access