VBA for serious development

[Eric]

I've been using VBA for assorted projects as needed but am debating putting
together an industrial strength application. I am comfortable enough with
VBA, although I do wish it supported inheritance and overloading.

I am not familiar with VB Net, and was wondering what the general feeling is
on VB Net vs. VBA for MS office app development.

Thanks,
Eric

 

[TC]

I have an app with about 75k loc in VBA. It is mainly in Access but
also automates Word to within an inch of its life. I am wondering how
to move this app forward into the future.

My concern about the .NET etchnologies (apart from the fact that I know
very little about them!), is that they still seem to be going through a
large amount of change. Ie. you are possibly coding to a moving target.
To get some feel for this, read the relevant blogs at blogs/msdn.com;
these really key you in to what is happening at microsoft.

None the less, at this stage, I personally feel that it would be
difficult to justify creating a large /new/ app in VBA; as opposed to
making a strategic decision to continue enhancing an old app.

Just my 2c, I'll be interested in what others have to say.

HTH,
TC

 

[Jonathan West]

I've been using VBA for assorted projects as needed but am debating
putting together an industrial strength application. I am comfortable
enough with VBA, although I do wish it supported inheritance and
overloading.

I am not familiar with VB Net, and was wondering what the general feeling
is on VB Net vs. VBA for MS office app development.

There is no single right answer to this - it depends very much on your
specific circumstances.

For instance, which version(s) of Office are you targetting? If you need to
support only Office 2003, then controlling Office from outside using VB.NET
and possibly VSTO might be a possibility. If you need to support older
versions, then you might be better off sticking with VBA.

Do you have a lot of VBA code already written that you would want to re-use
in the new app? If so, then VB.NET might be a poor choice as you may have to
rewrite substantial parts of it - the languages are not the same.

Will you be making use of web services or other items that are available
through the .NET framework? If so, then at least part of your app will need
to be in .NET.