3 ms·

> button to fire off the built-in Excel solver plugin and pull certain values That's pretty cool. VBA is terrific for glue code. Back in the day, before the I

> button to fire off the built-in Excel solver plugin and pull certain values That's pretty cool. VBA is terrific for glue code. Back in the day, before the Internet opened up the security hellmouth, ActiveX was pretty great for use cases like yours. Early '90s, I made an in-house cost estimation app using Access 2000. It'd extract data from our MicroStation (belch!) CAD drawings to generate budgets and bill of materials. Huge time saver. Here's a modern example: https://softwareconnect.com/construction-management/planswift/ https://softwareconnect.com/construction-management/planswif... Cost estimation apps rely on a database of SKUs, assemblies, etc. Every entry can have dependencies, equations, etc. Like "for every 10ft of X, add 1 widget Y". Super easy to implement with dynamic languages like LISP, where data can be code (macros). Not something Visual Basic is known for. My "one cool trick" was using VBA's built-in "eval" function equivalent.

tssva 3y ago
In the late 90s I worked for a small network solutions company. Cable infrastructure, lan, wan, email/file/printer servers. Most of our work was campus sized networks. Military bases, hospitals, corporate campuses, etc. We did all our drawings in Visio which hadn't yet been purchased by Microsoft. Visio added VBA support around 97 or 98. As soon as they did myself and the other network engineer on staff, we didn't have any developers, wrote a similar system in our "spare time" to extract a bill of materials and generate a cost estimate. Included everything down to the number of rack screws. I ended up leaving about 3 months after it was done but they continued to use it for a few years until it was replaced by a COTS system.
7thaccount 3y ago
What a small world. My wife is a MicroStation guru (civil engineer), but not a programmer. I've often wondered about how to make CAD work more productive.

tssva 3y ago

In the late 90s I worked for a small network solutions company. Cable infrastructure, lan, wan, email/file/printer servers. Most of our work was campus sized networks. Military bases, hospitals, corporate campuses, etc. We did all our drawings in Visio which hadn't yet been purchased by Microsoft. Visio added VBA support around 97 or 98. As soon as they did myself and the other network engineer on staff, we didn't have any developers, wrote a similar system in our "spare time" to extract a bill of materials and generate a cost estimate. Included everything down to the number of rack screws. I ended up leaving about 3 months after it was done but they continued to use it for a few years until it was replaced by a COTS system.

7thaccount 3y ago

What a small world. My wife is a MicroStation guru (civil engineer), but not a programmer. I've often wondered about how to make CAD work more productive.