Upgrading to Basic.net. Is VBA dead (or dying)?

[Allan P. London]

Folks,

I need some advice from the MVP's out there. I have a lot of Excel/VBA
applications that I have developed over the last 5 years. These
applications are for financial forecasting, consolidating financial
statements, sales and cost analysis, and derivative pricing models. Many
of these apps are really complicated (hundreds or even thousands of lines of
code) and most are still in use.

I presume that these apps will all have to be eventually converted to
Basic.net? And, since any major upgrade is going to come with a client
"wish list", that could be a lot of work.

So, do I start building new libraries and push the clients to convert now?
Is Version 12 is going to support VBA? If so, this may give me another 18
months of breathing room. What about new Excel projects? I would think
that I should use .net for all future projects. Assuming my code is fairly
structured and well commented, how difficult is it going to be to convert to
..net.

Any experience you experienced programmers could give me here will be
helpful.

Cheers,

Allan P. London, CPA
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Nick Hebb]

Read this from a program manager for the MS Office team:
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/07/12/438262.aspx

Quote: "We are by no means moving away from VBA though, which is why we
have the macro-enabled versions of the new formats. VBA is still very
important for a ton of our customers, and we will continue to support
their solutions going forward using the new file formats. "

If Microsoft dropped support for VBA, that might just be the catalyst
that pushed a lot of customers away from MS Office and toward Open
Office. They can't risk that.

So I wouldn't put any time or effort into converting exisiting code to
..NET, but it probably isn't a bad move for future work.

My $0.02,

Nick Hebb
BreezeTree Software
http://www.breezetree.com

 

[Nick Hodge]

Allan

I suspect VBA will be around for at least a couple more releases and
supported for around 5/6 more. That means that little of your coding will
break for a period of up to 15/20 years.

It should be remembered that XLM was 'retired' in V5 (circa 1992) and is
still in current releases.

Of course you could start to use VSTO to program against Office apps if you
want managed code, but I think most developers in Office should be
comfortable that at the moment any apps developed in VBA will have a long
enough future,

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