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."

Comments

ISOfication of OOXML vs VBA

[jkrise]

If OOXML is to become an ISO standard fully implemented in Office 2009; VBA and binary blobs will have to be deprecated and removed from the feature list.

Else, after ISO approval is sought and obtained, MS might claim it is deprecated but still provide support in Office..... either way, confused times ahead for the Office cash cow, methinks.

Of course,MS is catering to their real customers

[Coopjust]

And despite the security problems that have plagued users for years due to VBA viruses, Microsoft won't remove VBA from Office.

Interestingly enough:...

While it's true that VBA isn't supported in the latest version of Office for the Mac and the VBA licensing program did close to new customers last year, we have no plans to remove VBA from future versions of Office for Windows

Looks like MS may be crippling the Mac version to stop enterprises from moving on from Windows.

VBA for Mac

[christurkel]

VBA for Office Mac was dropped because AppleScript is far more powerful for the task and by dropping VBA you hinder cross platform compatibility. Devious.

Re:So Microsoft is at least still a *little* evil

[Anonymous Coward]

And if it's true that VBA is sticking around, then the folks running the Mac BU are liars. Either way, Microsoft can't be trusted.

May Deny But Intentions Are Clear

[littlewink]

VBScript is the core language of VBA and was the only extant language omitted with the release of .NET. Microsoft's language development groups didn't want to support the language - classic VB and VBA were held to be hacks. So it was proposed that VB/VBA be killed.

In a most unusual display of synchronicity, Microsoft's marketing group also wanted VBScript killed because:

• it was a "free language" - VBScript & ASP enabled web development in Notepad - selling Visual Studio development tools was next to impossible with a free and simple alternative available.
• a belief that millions of VBScript/ASP developers using Notepad would buy into the new .NET development environment tools. That is, greed.

What instead happened is that the millions of VB and ASP developers, seeing their toolkits and production code abandoned and marginalized by Microsoft, abandoned IIS, ASP and VB en masse.

Today .NET is on life-support: half a decade after the release of .NET there remain more .ASP pages on the WWW than .ASPX. Microsoft's latest release of .NET development tools presents the enterprise buyer with a more confounding variety of labels, choices and courses than has been available since the height of IBM's enterprise supremacy, none of them any better than their earlier products Notepad and VB.

Re:How about using .Net?

[Shados]

It won't be long... I mean, SSIS's script components already use VB.NET (and in the next version can use more languages), so the scaffold is already there.

Re:So Microsoft is at least still a *little* evil

[Schmodus]

Citation needed here.

That would be suicidal in Excel case.

[jacekm]

VBA in Excel case is a major advantage Excel has over most competitors. For many engineers capability to write custom programs using popular programming language within the spreadsheet makes Excel the spreadsheet of choice that has no viable competition. This drives rest of the company and cooperating suppliers into the MS Office as a standard. Dropping VBA would be in case of Excel poor decision. Such spreadsheet would lose support it has between technical professionals today. On the other hand I haven't seen much use of VBA in the rest of the MS Office applications. JAM

Re:So Microsoft is at least still a *little* evil

[rtb61]

Now that is an utter and total lie. M$ will with out any qualms or favour break every macro in every spreadsheet in they believe it will make them money and they have already done it once. I likeed the simple little macro language that cam with every spreadsheet program, sure there were some differences but it basically followed the same logic as the spreadsheet program itself.

Then the asshats at M$ wanted to make more money selling software licences for Bills baby, VBA, so fuck all the customers using spreadsheet macros, we will force them to change to VBA by dropping support for spreadsheet macros, and buy an additional software licence if they wanted the full program and the manual, at the same time we will use our monopoly to try to force every other company to incorporate a M$ VBA macro licence in their programs as well.

So will M$ fuck over the customer, in a heart beat.