Maintenance of old Word Project

[mamue]

Hi there,
since a while i maintain an old Word project written years ago in VBA
(Word 2000) and some WordBasic. It's becoming so complex during the
years, that i can't just convert the code to another programming
language manually.
I know that there will be heavy problems, especially if my company
decides to upgrade the Microsoft Office Version someday. I need a way
to be on the safe side, independent from the Word Version.
I'm not too deep in that whole VBA stuff, so I'm very open for all
suggestions, best practices and so on.

Thanks

 

[Jonathan West]

Hi there,
since a while i maintain an old Word project written years ago in VBA
(Word 2000) and some WordBasic. It's becoming so complex during the
years, that i can't just convert the code to another programming
language manually.
I know that there will be heavy problems, especially if my company
decides to upgrade the Microsoft Office Version someday. I need a way
to be on the safe side, independent from the Word Version.
I'm not too deep in that whole VBA stuff, so I'm very open for all
suggestions, best practices and so on.

Thanks

VBA is still in Office and will probably be in the next version as well. The
WordBasic object is still in Word VBA. Of course, if you change the version
of Office that you run under, you will need to thoroughly test everything in
case the change of platform changes behaviour. With a large and complex
project, you can be pretty sure that something will break.

Forget about attempting any kind of automated conversion out of VBA. The
tools for it just don't exist. The tools for converting VB6 code to VB.NET
never did work very will, and Microsoft has never attempted an equivalent
for VBA.

I would be inclined to leave your project in VBA. If some of the code is
getting a bit tangled, it might be an idea to rewrite some bits of it so
that it is easier to understand what is happening.

 

[mamue]

VBA is still in Office and will probably be in the next version as well. The
WordBasic object is still in Word VBA. Of course, if you change the version
of Office that you run under, you will need to thoroughly test everything in
case the change of platform changes behaviour. With a large and complex
project, you can be pretty sure that something will break.

Forget about attempting any kind of automated conversion out of VBA. The
tools for it just don't exist. The tools for converting VB6 code to VB.NET
never did work very will, and Microsoft has never attempted an equivalent
for VBA.

I would be inclined to leave your project in VBA. If some of the code is
getting a bit tangled, it might be an idea to rewrite some bits of it so
that it is easier to understand what is happening.

Thanks Jonathan,
if there occur errors with the Office Version I'll maybe rewrite the
corresponding function/macro. It's reassuring that VBA is supported
also with the latest versions.

 

[kiremark]

Most .dll's are forward compatiable. I would not worry too much about
that. If anything, you may have to re-reference a library.
(ex. Outlook 9 to Outlook 11) The functions still work the same, they
may take more optional parms.