Rick Grehan
It's the small things that count. VBAssist 3.5 ($179) from Sheridan Software (Melville, NY, (516) 753-0985; fax, (516) 723-3661) does small things. But it does so many small things, and it does them so well, that the resulting sum is greater than the parts.
In operation, VBAssist appears as a floating, tabbed toolbar. It executes concurrently with Visual Basic's IDE and adds capabilities primarily, but not exclusively, to VB's form designer. Here's an example: You're busy building a form, and you've placed a column of buttons along the right-hand side of the form window. You want it to look tidy, right? You want all the buttons to be the same size; you want them aligned precisely. You can do this in VB, but you'll probably have to dip into each button's properties box to verify width,
height, and so on. You're toiling when you'd rather be programming.
With VBAssist on the job, you simply size the topmost button the way you want it, select the remaining buttons of the group, and click on VBAssist's resize toolbar button. Voila, all buttons are now the same size. To align, select the button group and click on VBAssist's vertical alignment button. Done. VBAssist even provides a data entry field that lets you control spacing between buttons when you align them.
Such is the nature of VBAssist. When you find yourself wrestling with one of those tedious but necessary chores of VB application design, VBAssist steps in to smooth out the ride. Want to quickly arrange the tab order of entry fields? VBAssist lets you do it by simply clicking on the fields in the order you want.
I was particularly impressed with VBAssist's librarian-type functions. For example, say your organization has standardized the appearance of dialog boxes in which controls should have a particular color or a
caption should be in a particular font. VBAssist lets you gather those properties into a template and save the template into a library. Building a new application that adheres to your company's standards then becomes a snap: You pull the templates out of the library as you're constructing your forms, and your consistent user interface is assured.
A similar VBAssist function lets you place arbitrary pieces of frequently used source code into a code repository. Code "pieces" can be anything from an oft-used snippet to a full-blown routine, and VBAssist lets you attach up to four keywords to each element of the library. Finding your favorite sort routine is just a quick keyword search away.
VBAssist's data assistant tool lets you wire connections between a database table's fields and a form's data entry fields with drag-and-drop ease. With the help of VBAssist's form wizard, the data assistant will even whip up a prototype data browser form, code and all. Just tell it the table and the form, and it d
oes the rest. You can extend the resulting form and code to create more elaborate data management screens.
VBAssist is Administrative Assistant to Visual Basic
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VBAssist provides a number of useful utilities for Visual Basic programmers.
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