Re: The problem with not owning the software

On Sun, 29 Dec 2024 22:30:53 -0600, Char Jackson wrote:

On Sun, 29 Dec 2024 19:08:00 -0500, -hh <recscuba_google@huntzinger.com>
wrote:
 

I have a colleague who's done some amazing stuff in Excel using Visual
Basic Script (VBS); the PC I had at the time would fail just trying to
load the files; his beefy machine he had would take literally hours to
crunch through a set.  A quick search shows that I still have an older
copy: it takes up 14.34GB on disk. Youch.

 
I assume you meant to say VBA, Visual Basic for Applications, which is
built into each of the major MS Office applications?

Possibly, but there was a VBScript.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBScript

I used JScript which was similar to JavaScript but Microsoft didn't want
to butt heads with Sun. They had been down that road with Visual J++. You
could use either with Windows Script Host.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Script_Host

and make COM calls against the applications that supported it. For example
I used it in conjunction with EagleView (now Pictometry).  Given the
latitude and longitude of an incident I could create a URL referencing the
EagleView server, instantiate a connection to IE, and call the
NavigateTo() function with the URL. The relevant page would come up in IE.

It was a long way around the barn but it was easier than trying to
incorporate COM into an existing application. That was a very simple use
but you could make calls to any functionality exposed as COM. That whole
technology goes back to OLE and DDE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding

Very powerful but as it was designed to work with VisualBasic the data
structures were the wierd Basic things like BSTRs.