Comments on: Is VBA Recovering?

By: Charles Williams

Charles Williams — Thu, 15 May 2008 18:58:00 +0000

The most interesting comment for me in Schwieb's blog is:

"for a while now I and several others have been working with a group of people who know a heck of a lot about the internals of VB"

I had got the impression from MSoft's inability to fix VBE/VBA bugs that they did not have anyone left with any real knowledge of VB Internals, and the rumour-mill thought that VBA maintenance had been outsourced.

Schwieb's comment (and Bill Gates's recent remarks) leaves me hoping that some knowledgeable resource has been assigned to VBE/VBA for Office 14.

By: Harald Staff

Harald Staff — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:16:00 +0000

Doco, sorry, others beat me to it. Let me add; Spend 10 minutes on the post that made him really famous
http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2006/08/08/saying-goodbye-to-visual-basic/
and optional the following discussion. One may dislike and disagree on ideas and conclusions, but it is first hand first class info from the top guy. Not everyday material this.

By: Dick Kusleika

Dick Kusleika — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:01:00 +0000

Schwieb is inside the walls of the great beast. He also blogs consistently. He can be accused of singing the company song, but he seems to be more forthright than most MS bloggers. I don’t know if that makes him important, but it makes me want to read what he writes (with proper BS filters on).

By: Andy Pope

Andy Pope — Thu, 15 May 2008 13:44:00 +0000

This will answer the "who" part of your question.
http://www.schwieb.com/blog/about/

By: doco

doco — Thu, 15 May 2008 13:00:00 +0000

I have run this question over and over in my mind and can think of no way to ask it without sounding sarcastic; which is not my intention. But Harald, who is Schwieb and what makes him important?

By: Simon Murphy

Simon Murphy — Wed, 14 May 2008 22:30:00 +0000

Charles OpenOffice.org has the best cross platform scripting compatibility story at the moment. And as they further improve their VBA support things can only get better.

I've done a decent bit of XLM recently, but its not what I would consider a future proof technology. Unlike VBA which seemingly has a rosy future.

By: fzz

fzz — Wed, 14 May 2008 22:06:00 +0000

I've never been able to believe that VB was the most wonderful programming language ever conceived. Was it the VB6 IDE that was so special, or VB's particular syntax for optional arguments and named arguments in any order the programmer feels like?

Anyway it's good VBA is going to be back in Mac versions of Office. Maybe there were some colleges and universities with considerable numbers of Macs that may have threatened to replace Excel with OpenOffice Calc in their courses. Maybe they or organizations which use both Macs and PCs let Microsoft know that, no, they had no intention of trying to run Windows versions of Office via emulation.

Maybe Microsoft is admitting they screwed up, but it's also the case people who bought Office 2008 will have to buy an upgrade to get a version with VBA.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Wed, 14 May 2008 19:00:00 +0000

The issue isn’t the runtimes, because those are included in XP and Vista. AISI, the issue was the lack of compatibility between VB6 and VB.Net, and the lack of a reasonable upgrade path. The end user is certainly going to feel the pain, if that end user has commissioned utilities (not unlike the add-ins you cite) and wants them upgraded.

By: zach

zach — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:09:00 +0000

I think the difference between the VB6 shafting and the VBA issue is that VB6 was always an environment in which the output was almost always destined to be a stand alone distributable executable. Sure the target system needed to have the VBRUN dlls, but that's it. I don't like it, but I can understand the rationale behind expecting those users to switch to the .net platform. As much havoc as it may be to the developer, the end user is not going to know the difference.

VBA, on the other hand, can't be so easily replaced with VSTO. A software house built add-in such as the kind any good enterprise financial app offers can be ported, of course. But how many of us are willing to invest the time to port over what is essentially a quick-and-dirty macro? If I whip something together for a coworker or client, it is easy enough to explain to them that they just need to enable macros and click on the button on the worksheet. I'm not going to be able to convince them of much more than that, nor do I have the time to invest into it.

Does anyone remember that scripting thing that was in Office 2003 that you'd get to by hitting Alt-Shift-F11? I ignored that thing for 4 years and now it is gone. I expect much the same for VSTO.

By: Charles Williams

Charles Williams — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:36:00 +0000

Drat! There goes my cunning plan to make loads-of-money by learning XLM as the only viable cross-platform Excel scripting language …