But my customers are always right: so if my customers want me to develop using VB.NET I will explain to them that at the moment developing office applications using vb.net is more difficult and hence more expensive and not my recommendation: but if they still want office.net thats OK for my profits.

And if my customers are crazy enough to ask me to rewrite their existing apps (some of my customers have over 50K lines of VBA) the same scenario applies: explain this is not sensible then take the money if they insist.

I do the following:

# For simple applications to be used in productions-enviroment with “stupid terminals” I use Delphi 5.0.

(Many times I compile the exe-file less then 350 kb and they don’t not require 8 MB – 20 MB system / supportfiles to be installed).

# For more advanced applications I use
VB 6.0 or VB.NET depending on customer’s choices.

With one exception:
If the application will automate / manipulate Excel I always recommend customers that we use VB 6.0

# For pure Excel / office-applications VBA and VB 6.0 for ActiveX DLLs.

Kind regards,
Dennis

I for one, write applications aimed at MS Office. Since a huge percentage of the clients I aim at hasn’t upgraded to Office 2003 yet, learning .NET doesn’t have a very high priority for me.

VB6 and VBA are much better tools as it is right now anyway, when you’re writing applications in/for Office.

But as soon as large companies start adopting Office 2003 and want to have managed code for their (MS Office) applications, I’m in trouble because I haven’t had a look at things like VSTO yet.

So it is on my list of things to do, because the only way to survive this business is to keep up with the developments. Whether I like it or not.

Most clients have shunned Excel 2003 because they rightfully don’t see a lot of new features unless they buy into Microsoft’s other products (like Sharepoint). MS has provided a poor migration path for existing Excel developers in my opinion. I still can’t see why VSTO could not have supported earlier versions of Excel.

I’ve been successful in creating my own COM Interop layers for Office 2000 and controlling it from .NET, but the result isn’t nearly as well packaged as what I can do with VBA internally. If MS wants VBA developers to take .NET seriously they’ve got to do better than VSTO and only offering support for the latest version of Excel.

That having been said I’ve adopted ASP.NET wholeheartedly for web development and in general I like the .NET environment. I just think the integration with Office has been badly botched thus far.

I am sure I am about to be misunderstood but I will give it a try.

The only constant is change. This is not likely to change (oxymoron?) If it is a certainty that VB/VBA is on its way down, like it or not, move.

There is another proverb: sufficient to the day is the evil thereof. In other words we cannot really know what 10 years will look like, so why fret about it today? If .NET goes away in favor of .Hologram or ???? then we who are still around will have to – move.

MY brother is a well known developer. His claim is “I am only one manual ahead of my competition…”

Learn both VB/VBA and .NET – probably should anyway.

After spending months of my free time studying .NET, my first assignment other than VB was C# – I knew little to nothing about it – but I found out real quick.

I hate it but its the way it is.

I’m worried, though, that I might have to switch to English.NET Studio++ if MS gets their way.