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VBA Going Away, Macs Now, PCs Soon
Nom du Keyboard writes "As Microsoft drops support for older Office file formats, it looks like Visual Basic for Applications is also going soon. Mac Office 2008 has dropped VBA in favor of enhanced support for AppleScript, and Office 2009 is scheduled to lose it in favor of Mac incompatible Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) or Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). This sounds like the Mother of All Backwards and Cross-Platform Incompatibilities — especially since there appears to be no transition period where both the old and new scripting languages will be simultaneously supported. And as past experience with Visual Studio .NET has shown, upgrade tools are far less than perfect."
This could be good news! We currently have to support MS Office versions of our customizations for Windows, and OOo versions for Linux / Unix. Since Microsoft is forcing us to go back and rewrite the MS Office versions if we upgrade our Windows apps - why not just upgrade to OOo on all platforms, avoid the rewrite cost, and maintain just one set of customizations going forward!
Yes, yes, I see a great "employee suggestion" fattening my wallet this year...
One word.... RAD. Well, ok, it's really three words.
;)
With the PHBs having been promised projects developed in half the time with a smaller team, I can see how VB got it's bloated non-type-safe foot in the door.
And rewriting projects now that are a VB fiasco is making for lots of development jobs
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
I don't mind seeing software companies trash their customers' investments this way. It just means that more people will learn (albeit the hard way) just how tied they are to the whims of their vendors, and seek a way to end the pain. The outcomes of that are generally a step forward for the industry.
For example, this could cause some people to start demanding more of their software vendors (e.g. open formats, better support contracts, whatever). Or it could cause them to look at free/open formats and software as a way to avoid this problem in the future.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
I guess moving to OO or StarOffice would not be such a bad move after all then. La least the macro language is consistent across apllications as well as platforms.
..
I guess the only question remaining is why you would run Windows after that, but you should ave been asking that question quite a while back
Insert
Screwed over and locked in, with no cross-platform support?
Flippancy aside, Microsoft trots out what they decree is the Next Big Thing about every 4-5 years. In the process, they act like what they used to call the New Hotness is a smelly pile they want to get away from, and drop support for it. Of course, it was a smelly pile in the first place, but it was their smelly pile and they wanted you to buy it and spent a lot of money convincing you it was good.
In the mean time, companies have spent a lot of money supporting and implementing the technologies, buying training, books, etc. Then you re-start the cycle all over again. This is just the next in a long-line of technologies that Microsoft has swept under the rug and moved on. Then a whole new gravy train starts.
Of course, they get the added benefit that you will have even less support and functionality on Mac OS. And, if that is the case, then why would someone by a Mac when they need Office?
I suspect this is 1/3 "technical", 1/3 "strategic", and 1/3 "because we can, bitches".
In the end, who is to stop them? The customers never leave en masse like people have been predicting for as long as I can remember. People adopt the technologies. And, everyone just sucks it up and gets on with their day.
Trotting new, unfinished technologies and dropping older, unfinished technologies and charging for it is Microsoft's bread and butter. It's one big hamster wheel.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I think you are criticizing an organic process for choosing the path of least resistance.
Futile and somewhat incompletely informed spring to mind.
VB is successful because most of the potential applications for computers are not terribly time or resource constrained, most applications are cost-of-development constrained. VB is chosen because it consistently provides the path of least resistance to the first deliverable result, and executives will always bet on the horse that makes it to the first turn - first.
I'm suggesting these executives are not silly - they realize that in the rare case that a software becomes truly important, they will invest in an upgrade - but they avoid the upgrade costs on all the other trial balloons that fill the long spans between truly-imperative-software.
In any cases, engineers who race to the first pole, do so because it keeps them employed, and that ain't so silly either.
Criticizing a platform for being popular is what is silly in my humble opinion.
AIK
Nope, you misunderstand the strategy employed by Microsoft.
First, they say they will make a sudden switch, everyone will be stumped, irked, and in various states of disbelief at their ballsy move.
Then they will "concede" and support both scripting languages for one more version, and people will think they've won, and a gradual transition takes place. Managers are happy because they "made" Microsoft change their position on abandoning VB right away, and Microsoft will be happy because they were planning it all along. The only unhappy few are the IT people that get to recode from one language into another.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
I'm not surprised that Microsoft is dropping VBA support for the Mac. After all, the easiest way to kill the Mac as a viable business platform is to make it so that business applications written in VBA on top of Excel or Word no longer work on the Mac. Microsoft is starting to get a little worried about losing desktop marketshare to Apple, and a crippled or incompatible MS Office for Mac would fix that perfectly.
Forcing people to rewrite VBA applications on Windows, on the other hand, is a completely different kettle of fish. One of the primary reasons that OpenOffice.org has problems in the corporate market is that companies have invested heavily in applications written in VBA on top of Word and Excel. If Microsoft forces people to rewrite these applications then the door is suddenly wide open for MS Office replacements.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
They've shifted scripting paradigms before. Word used to have its own dialect of Basic, and Excel originally did all its scripting with those @ functions.
.NET, they neglected to replicate this functionality. They did provide a .NET version of VB, but it's just another OO language. So VB.NET programmers have to master the .NET object framework. Might as well learn C# and be done with it.
What's really painful is not the death of VBA as such. What's painful is Microsoft's decision to do away with the whole Visual Basic paradigm without providing anything to replace it.
What do I mean by by "Visual Basic paradigm"? I don't mean the (very sucky) language. I mean the integration of the language to all those COM interfaces that permeate Microsoftland, including Office. These COM interfaces are all part of object frameworks, but because they're interfaces rather than objects, you don't have to master the object framework in order to use them
When MS got bored with COM and decided to move on to
I'm a user of OneNote, which was the first MS Office application to be released without a builtin Visual Basic engine. You can automate OneNote, but the learning curve's much steeper than it would be with VBA. I've never found time to assault it.
Even though I've always despised the pre-.NET dialect of Visual Basic, I find I'm missing it terribly.
I'm not all corporations, but I've been around a few decades. Here's my 2 cents worth.
All of the OOo code is licensed under the LGPL, and can be freely downloaded, built and customized. So yes, it's possible. The sky's the limit; it's just software. :-) Several factors make it less likely that a corporation would take this approach, however.
One is that such a customization would very likely be deemed a "derivative work" by Legal, in which case if it were distributed (e.g., to suppliers for a given project, or even arguably to contractors working for the corporation), then the source must be made available as well. Non-software corporations tend to be allergic to releasing their source code, in my experience, because their lawyers tend to be very conservative. Some manager somewhere will likely have to bet his career by accepting legal liability for the corporation. Will the risk to his career if Something Bad Happens justify the benefit he perceives?
The issue of support will also likely be raised. What if the customized version breaks - who will "support" it? Yes, yes, we all know the internal team of developers will - assuming they weren't laid off in the last "shareholder value" improvement exercise (a constant risk in corporate America). But IT directors tend to go the other direction, from what I've seen - they want to outsource support (and legal indemnification) for open source software, so it can be treated as if it were proprietary. Proprietary means comfort; a target at which the finger can point if Something Bad Happens. This tendency is likely the foundation of IBM's business case for Symphony, by the way.
Finally, if a support team were to be established in a corporation to produce a custom version of OOo, they would need to have some type of development environment. As much fun as bashing Microsoft may be, Visual Studio and .NET are not technically inferior products. So a corporation is unlikely to consider that an inferior option to, say, Eclipse technology. Sure, it costs a lot more - but it's a small number of licenses. They probably wouldn't hesitate.
But in the end, I suspect a lot of corporations just want to write scripts and such without mucking around in the source code proper. The issues most likely to resonate are: (1) How do you efficiently distribute the customizations? (2) How hard are they to develop and maintain? and (3) Can we use them on all of our platforms as is, or do we have to port or (ack!) redevelop for each platform? The third is where Microsoft's "Windows Everywhere" bias may hurt them with this decision to abandon VBA. (Gee, now I'm sure glad we chose to use Python as the scripting language in our internal applications! :-)
VB was the first language which offered RAD - while at the same time offering the technical breadth and reach of 3rd-party add-ons and access to the Windows API.
.Net - The benefits of natural language, and minimal punctuation will continue to accelerate learning of VB over contrived syntaxes.
The language is absent the jargon-punctuation cruft of c {};
And instead closely follows a language with worldwide recognition.
In some respects c can be compared to latin, or perhaps better to esperanto, which is a contrived language which doesn't resonate with any significant population from birth.
VB, on the other hand, recognizes and embraces the symbolic similarities between branching in code, and branching in languages. It turns out that the advantage of shadowing a natural language are born out in adoption rates and learning curves.
I agree, that VB6 had some issues, limitations etc, but notwithstanding the pain of starting over in
- Again, I am impressed, and you should be as well, that 168-form VB apps could even be written by people who are obviously ill-equipped to produce similar software in any other language. This feat must, at some level, be taken as a complement of the degree to which VB has papered-over a great deal of the complexity of code-writing. I suggest it is a criticism that java, ruby, or perl, hasn't been nearly as effective in bringing systems-design to a broader audience.
AIK
The great thing is that we've got a bunch of MS Access "applications" that we can't get funding to re-write properly. Once Office doesn't support VBA, they'll have no choice. We'll then migrate them to unix land and probably Sybase, Oracle, or Postgres.
Allowing business users to have Access is like giving an unsupervised 6 year old a handgun. They can work it, but they have no idea how to be responsible with it and will probably do much more harm than good.