Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Says VBA Is Here To Stay
Angostura writes "Microsoft's team blog for Microsoft Excel and Excel Services has responded with a denial to the earlier report that Visual Basic for Applications will disappear from Windows Office in 2009. The Slashdot discussion on the report on Tuesday got pretty animated."
The link that _I_ clicked took me to a blog that said that VBA was no longer supported, and that the licensing program had gone away. To me this means 'dead'. No support and no license means that no reputable vendor is going to nail any new shingles to this product. Any future offerings using VBA are destined to be either snakeoil or shareware.
Am I missing something here?
Point by point:
1. VBA isn't supported in the latest Office for Mac
2. VBA isn't being licensed for third party inclusions anymore
3. There are no plans to remove VBA from future versions of Office for Windows
4. No plan to remove VBA from future versions of Excel
So, its not supported for Mac, and new developers cannot include it in their products, but it will remain supported in Office for Windows apps. Not sure what blog you were reading!
There's no way they were going to release an Office suite without any macro capability, but the blow is that they aren't replacing it with .NET .
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I've got no problem with them revamping VBA and breaking things here and there to make everything more robust. I'd much rather fix existing macros than start from scratch.
We're smarter now and we typically make web apps, but when Excel 5.0 (IIRC) came out with VBA, it was like geek crack. We made so many VBA macros that it seems like that was all I did for a few years. Now, practically our whole measurement lab relies on VBA in some way or another. It would be quite a bit of work to re-write all of those little macros.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
That's fine with MS. You have to buy a Windows license to do that.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I don't know why you were modded 'Troll'. I think your statements are accurate. There are way too many lines of VB code written for businesses to want it to go away. If they had to re-write those lines (no matter what new language will be, or what the quality of the VB is), they would more likely abandon the need to upgrade. As for the ribbon, I haven't seen it, but that might be because my company didn't think it was necessary to upgrade to the current version of Office.
Whether we like it or not VB is here to stay. The cost to convert the older stuff is way too high.
VBA relies on COM and parts of the original (up to VB6) VB engine to do its job. The Mac layer was based on a COM implementation on Mac. To continue the licensing scheme, they would have to maintain the complete library and eventually port it to 64-bitness. Just keeping the bits needed for Office can be simpler. At least, they won't have to maintain an external-product quality interface to the host application developers anymore. VBA support in a future Office release might be done through process separation and a separate thunking layer (moving all the COM servers out of the actual process and making those talk to the actual Office applications through the new API), or translation on the fly to a new environment. Keeping support doesn't have to mean that the current environment really stays there.
Isn't that what Visual Studio Tools for Office does? I've never really looked into it much, but my understanding was that it was a .NET replacement for writing Office apps with VBA.