Visual Studio

[AD108]

Is it possible / practical to manipulate an existing VBA application with
Visual Studio, or would it require a rewrite to begin using Visual Studio?

I am considering developing an Excell and Access application in VBA, however
in the future I may want to turn the application into a web based one. I've
heard that Visual Studio is a good platform to do this.

Thanks in advance.

Ariel

 

[JLatham]

Depends mainly on how much use of the 'native objects' of the VBA application
you use in your VBA code. That is, if you are doing a lot of referencing of
cells, worksheets, and ranges; things unique to Excel within the code, then
you're going to have to work at it in the conversion, getting references to
needed libraries and such. Same for Access when referencing queries,
recordsets, fields within recordsets, reports, etc.

Obviously if you already have working Excel/Access versions of these
applications, they will provide a solid roadmap in developing within Visual
Studio.

I don't do much (any?) web based stuff myself but I've found for non-web
based applications the ability to set up references to other libraries (such
as a reference within Excel to the Access libraries) permits some really
slick work to be done in communicating between the two (or more - I've had
Access apps that used OLE to provide data interchanges between Access, Excel
and Outlook and have lots of Excel apps that interface in a similar fashion
with various databases - mostly Access).

 

[AD108]

Thanks for the reply,

So basically, I would just need to establish the appropriate references to
libraries?


Ariel

 

[JLatham]

I'd really hate to give you some bad advice on this - I don't do any web
development, and it's been some time since I used VS for even a localized
solution. I'm thinking that one of the Office Developer forums would be a
better source for a definitive answer; either the Developer or Web Components
group under Office Developer:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/FlyoutOverview.mspx#6