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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."
I find it amazing how MS is eager to cut the branch it's sitting on these times.
I thought VBA was one of the major reasons for businesses to not switch to alternatives : because they developped in-house lots of VBA code to achieve some tasks, that would tie them to the MS-Office suite.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Only less than fully informed because I didn't qualify it.
The rewrite projects I've seen regarding VB to [insert your own language of choice here] seem to be wrapped around a common theme... unsupportable code. While I'm sure there are plenty of enterprise level applications out there written in VB and well-written, the majority of what I've seen takes form level code and spaghetti to a whole new level.
My only guess as to why this happens with such frequency is the environment in the late 90s where there were more jobs than programmers, too many "Sam's Teach Yourself Visual Basic in 21 Hours" books, and a lack of architecural knowledge leading VB teams down the path of no return.
What many companies are left with are legacy apps that nobody wants to support, much less enhance. And with webServices, AJAX and all that is Web 2.0, and a bevy of other technologies that people want to utilize, enhancing kludgy enterprise VB apps with no architecture tends to be more expensive than a proper rewrite.
A funny note: I'm currently contracted to a company that lost all of it's Java/Jade developers when part of the company was sold. In an effort to get the software on supported technology, phase 1 of this project is to reverse engineer the (completely undocumented) application and recreate it in C#. No changes allowed, regardless of best practices. Phase 2 is to completely rewrite it. By reading this could you guess this company is in the oil and gas industry?
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
All the UNIX skills I developed over the last 20 years are still useful. So glad I haven't bothered to spend any time on the MS treadmill. Heck, all the software I wrote over the last 20 years can still be compiled and runs happily on a modern machine that is hundreds of times faster than the SPARCstation 1 I used to run on.
Do you think the PHBs will ever learn that using proprietary systems like Windows may seem cheaper in the short term but in the long run you open your wallet and let them take take take?
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
MS is not trying to improve their product by removing/upgrading VBA.. They just want to kill Mac. By providing different scripting languages for the two platforms, they are going to eliminate Macs from being used for business. Since most of your customers don't have Macs, you can't use a Mac to write a document with macros in it. So, you have to buy Windows.
echo 'cat sig | sh' > sig