Microsoft future support for VBA - comments

[Leigh Harrison]

All,

I am looking to migrate from Access to using SQL/server.

Is it worth me investing in visual studio tools for office 2003 as well?

The plan for this strategy is to run it for at least 5 years before
looking at changing.

How much support do you believe Microsoft will have for VBA in 5 years?

Any comments welcome.

Many thanks in advance,
Leigh H

 

[Jonathan West]

All,

I am looking to migrate from Access to using SQL/server.

Is it worth me investing in visual studio tools for office 2003 as well?

The plan for this strategy is to run it for at least 5 years before
looking at changing.

How much support do you believe Microsoft will have for VBA in 5 years?

Any comments welcome.

Hi Leigh,

Microsoft has made a public commitment that VBA will be in the next version
of Office (Office 12), due for release sometime next year. Microsoft
normally works on the basis of having version x of a product as the current
version, and having versions x-1 and x-2 still on mainstream support.

As Microsoft seems to work on a product cycle of releasing a new version of
Office roughly every two years, I estimate that it will be sometime around
2012 before Office 12 drops out of support and VBA along with it.

Nobody at Microsoft has made any statement regarding support for VBA in
versions of Office after Office 12, and I suspect that those in Microsoft
responsible that have not yet made any decision. If they decide to include
VBA in further versions of Office, then the support timescales extend
accordingly.

A decision on whether to drop VBA in a future version of Office would be
very difficult for Microsoft. I wrote the following article on the topic
about 3 years ago, and the issues it raises haven't changed much.

Office and .NET: Better Together?
http://www.ftponline.com/vsm/2002_08/magazine/departments/guestop/default.aspx

If you want to increase the chance that VBA will be retained by Microsoft,
then I would suggest you go to www.classicvb.org and sign the petition
there. This article may help explain the link between VB and VBA and why
supporting Classic VB will help with VBA.

Save Classic VB!
http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMArticle.asp?ID=516


--
Regards
Jonathan West - Word MVP
www.intelligentdocuments.co.uk
Please reply to the newsgroup
Keep your VBA code safe, sign the ClassicVB petition www.classicvb.org

 

[Howard Kaikow]

VSTO is not needed.
Office macros are written using VBA.

 

[Nick Hodge]

And the decent(ish) version of VSTO (2) Only works with Office 2003

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Howard Kaikow]

VSTO Is just smoke and mirrors.
The only useful purpose is show the direction MSFT may be going in
..NET-izing Office, but VSTO is useless as far as the most important uses of
VBA, i.e., writing macros for inclusion is Word templates, Excel workbooks,
etc.

 

[Jonathan West]

And the decent(ish) version of VSTO (2) Only works with Office 2003

I think it is reasonable to say that the target market for VSTO is .NET
developers wishing to control Office, not Office developers wishing to
access .NET.

It would not surprise me if a future version of Office includes an embedded
form of VB.NET with the same kind of relationship to the standalone VB.NET
that VBA has to VB6. It is much more unclear whether embedded VB.NET and VBA
will be available in parallel with each other, and whether it will be
possible to call VBA routines from VB.NET routines & vice versa.


--
Regards
Jonathan West - Word MVP
www.intelligentdocuments.co.uk
Please reply to the newsgroup
Keep your VBA code safe, sign the ClassicVB petition www.classicvb.org

 

[Nick Hodge]

Jonathon

I'm not about to argue with that.... I can do virtually everything needed in
VBA with Excel. MS feel I *should* want to use VSTO, but I don't. I just
feel for people without a detailed knowledge of the naturally disparate
object models of the Office Apps who write managed code daily, it's much
easier to do so in VSTO 2.

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Leigh,

I am looking to migrate from Access to using SQL/server.

Is it worth me investing in visual studio tools for office 2003 as well?

You should be able to d/l the VS2005 beta, currently running, from
microsoft.com (msdn site, I think). I'd take a real close look at it, if
you're migrating to SQL Server, anyway.

Whether to go to VSTO or not really depends on what you want to do with
the data, how much of what you want to do is going to be new code, and how
much you'd have to migrate.

If you're looking at new things to do with the data. Or caching data in a
file would be a boon. Or being able to include your own "task panes" is
the answer to your prayers. Or if you like the sound of updates being
automtically pushed out to the users.

Then also take a close look at VSTO 2.0 (running in parallel beta with VS
2005).

The plan for this strategy is to run it for at least 5 years before
looking at changing.

How much support do you believe Microsoft will have for VBA in 5 years?

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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