Planning future programming environment: office.net problems?

Hi -

After finishing some larger programming tasks, I'm now trying to lay
the groundwork for the next couple of years (5 or so) for development
of internal software. For the last five years we've been handling most
of internal development with Excel and VBA from XL97 through Xl2k, but
also substantial amounts of VB6 after a relatively painful transition
from VB4 and the entire 16-bit world.

I've heard indirectly of some of the problems that Office.NET is
causing for VB6 developers (and therefore for VBA) and the apparent
willingness of MSFT to require the shift to Office.NET if we are to get
any sort of technical support (which we haven't in past, but hey...).

I did a google on office.net+vba+excel+problems and didn't get very
far; variations didn't help much either (dropping one or the other
term).

Is there a resource out there somewhere that can give me some pointers
on how to address what Office.NET and the death of VBA means to us? If
we *have* to make such a transition, then it might behoove us to
abandon the whole internal tools stuff and move more directly to XML
(especially considering that we need to produce gobs of PDF files and
there is some pretty neat stuff going on at Adobe for designing PDF
files using XML...).

We don't use Word at all due to problems in being able to map out
documents; we do use PPoint and Access, but ultimately we don't *have*
to use them if using them means chaining ourselves to unwieldly and
poorly implemented programming environments: hence it's a question of
getting data out of databases, turning the data into charts and tables,
organizing these into reports and writing anaylses of the reports.

We use our own proprietary database format via a VB6 addin to Excel,
but are in the process of moving to Access databases as an option. But
we need to keep the add-in to Excel and provide access to our data from
within Excel.

How does Office.NET stack up here? We've not had any problems with
either VB6, VBA or Excel beyond the usual kind of limitations of the
environment (Excel's garbage collection is, shall we say, at times an
issue, but that's another story), and frankly from what I've heard of
Office.NET and the petition (and I've already signed it), things aren't
looking that rosy.

Thank in advance

John

Hi [email protected],

> How does Office.NET stack up here? We've not had any problems with
> either VB6, VBA or Excel beyond the usual kind of limitations of the
> environment (Excel's garbage collection is, shall we say, at times an
> issue, but that's another story), and frankly from what I've heard of
> Office.NET and the petition (and I've already signed it), things aren't
> looking that rosy.

Have a look at this discussion:

http://www.*****-blog.com/archives/2...ic-vb/#comment
s

Regards,

Jan Karel Pieterse
Excel MVP
www.jkp-ads.com

Hi -

Thanks for the tip, I hadn't seen how that conversation developed.

>From what I can see, the Excel Object model doesn't port nicely to
..NET. This could be a real make-or-break for us, guess we'll just have
to wait and see...

John