Hacking VBA to support native scripting runtime with no COM dependencies

(github.com)

24 points by n0138 days ago

3 comments

  • moron4hire1 day ago
    This will be really useful for my coworkers who get stuck in SCIFs with nothing but Excel available to them.
    • password43211 day ago
      Also: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;PerditionC&#x2F;VBAChromeDevProtocol" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;PerditionC&#x2F;VBAChromeDevProtocol</a><p><i>VBA (Excel) based wrapper for Chrome Developer Protocol (CDP) - sorta a VBA version of Puppeteer&#x2F;Selenium</i>
  • blargthorwars1 day ago
    Friendly reminder for MS Access fiends:<p>It&#x27;s ok to store code in tables and then pass it to VBA for evaluation via Eval, or to ASF via the engine.Compile
    • cyanydeez1 day ago
      But what if i want to debug my code?
      • blargthorwars1 day ago
        Great question! Programmatically copy your snippet to a module, then call it:<p>Public Sub AppendCode() Dim cm As Object Set cm = Application.VBE.VBProjects(1).VBComponents(&quot;GeneratedLogic&quot;).CodeModule<p><pre><code> cm.InsertLines cm.CountOfLines + 1, _ &quot;Public Sub NewProc()&quot; &amp; vbCrLf &amp; _ &quot; MsgBox &quot;&quot;Dynamically added&quot;&quot;&quot; &amp; vbCrLf &amp; _ &quot;End Sub&quot;</code></pre> End Sub
        • mschuster911 day ago
          I&#x27;ve written my fair share of evil shit in VBA.<p>But... what is effectively eval() just in VB? Yikes.
          • n01321 hours 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.
          • moron4hire1 day ago
            For the people who would be using this, they would almost never even have <i>other people&#x27;s</i> code, say nothing of whether it&#x27;s untrusted.
      • n01321 hours 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.
  • fibers1 day ago
    This looks so useful.