Expert Access™ 2007 Programming

Chapter 4. Debugging, Error Handling, and Coding Practices

We all have to deal with certain tasks of application development. While customers may never directly see these tasks — such as debugging and error handling — the applications we develop are better for it. We do these tasks in our applications all the time during development, and it's often a part of the job that developers don't enjoy.

Although the effects of these activities are not necessarily obvious to your users, improper or insufficient error handling is very obvious. Think about how many times you have tried to hide Access error messages from your users. For an end user, seeing a custom error message provides a better experience than a dialog box that asks them to debug.

In this chapter you learn:

• How to effectively debug VBA code

• How to programmatically build a call stack

• How to create debug builds for your applications that provide functionality during development

• How to use assertions in code to help with debugging

• How to write your own Assert method

• How to use error handling as a feature to notify you when things go wrong

• General coding practices that are helpful in day-to-day development

Debugging

Debugging is one of those things that many people seem to either love or hate. Personally, we enjoy debugging. We find that it gives us a better understanding of the code, particularly when inheriting a project from another developer. To us, debugging (and really writing code in general) is a mixture of art and science. We find ...