Hacking VBA to support native scripting runtime with no COM dependencies

https://github.com/ECP-Solutions/ASF

24•n013•1mo ago

Comments

moron4hire•1mo ago

This will be really useful for my coworkers who get stuck in SCIFs with nothing but Excel available to them.

password4321•1mo ago

Also: https://github.com/PerditionC/VBAChromeDevProtocol

VBA (Excel) based wrapper for Chrome Developer Protocol (CDP) - sorta a VBA version of Puppeteer/Selenium

blargthorwars•1mo ago

Friendly reminder for MS Access fiends:

It's ok to store code in tables and then pass it to VBA for evaluation via Eval, or to ASF via the engine.Compile

cyanydeez•1mo ago

But what if i want to debug my code?

blargthorwars•1mo ago

Great question! Programmatically copy your snippet to a module, then call it:

Public Sub AppendCode() Dim cm As Object Set cm = Application.VBE.VBProjects(1).VBComponents("GeneratedLogic").CodeModule

    cm.InsertLines cm.CountOfLines + 1, _
        "Public Sub NewProc()" & vbCrLf & _
        "    MsgBox ""Dynamically added""" & vbCrLf & _
        "End Sub"

End Sub

mschuster91•1mo ago

I've written my fair share of evil shit in VBA.

But... what is effectively eval() just in VB? Yikes.

moron4hire•1mo ago

For the people who would be using this, they would almost never even have other people's code, say nothing of whether it's untrusted.

n013•1mo ago

Honestly, ASF is literally sandboxed. Objects cannot be injected in the runtime. Also, VBA Expressions is intentionally limited to receive and return VBA strings. So, the system is safe for execute code from (almost) anyone.

n013•1mo ago

You can inspect the AST in order to debug your code. For syntax highlighting, use tools like Notepad++ (ASF shares most of the syntax with Javascript). Each piece of code is commented, no obscure machine code.

fibers•1mo ago

This looks so useful.

I replaced the front page with AI slop and honestly it's an improvement

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