Vsto .

[teylyn]

VSTO

Do you know what it is?

Do you know how to develop with it? For Excel, for that matter?

Do you care?

Are you concerned that your VBA experience will go down the drain?

Are you confident that VSTO will never replace VBA for the "small time user who just needs a quick conditional copy macro"?

Do you still bother to further your VBA knowledge?

Are you trying to scrape together the $$$ to buy the full VSTO licence?

Are you confident in Visual Basic?

Is C# something that you rather not play on the piano or something you hack every day on the keyboard?

Will you set up a business to maintain legacy VBA applications? -- Now there's an idea!

If you've read this far, you probably want to comment. Keen to read what you have to say.

[martindwilson]

no!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[contaminated]

Vsto is Visual Studio Tools for Office?

[ratcat]

VSTO

Do you know what it is? Very Stupid Thread by the Operator

Do you know how to develop with it? For Excel, for that matter? If I can get the Operator to do my Excel for me

Do you care? Yes, if its does all the Excel work for me

Are you concerned that your VBA experience will go down the drain? I'm VBA stupid

Are you confident that VSTO will never replace VBA for the "small time user who just needs a quick conditional copy macro"? Still don't know what VSTO is or VBA for that matter

Do you still bother to further your VBA knowledge? Still out to lunch to that one...who want's to join me ?

Are you trying to scrape together the $$$ to buy the full VSTO licence? Pay ?!?!!! Hahaha there will some internet pirate handing it out for free in 6 months time lol

Are you confident in Visual Basic? Yeah I'm basic is that a problem

Is C# something that you rather not play on the piano or something you hack every day on the keyboard? Love tinkling the ivories

Will you set up a business to maintain legacy VBA applications? -- Now there's an idea! Business ?........sound like to much hard work

If you've read this far, you probably want to comment. Keen to read what you have to say.

[teylyn]

ratcat, GETOUTTAHERE. I'm trying to start a sensible discussion, for xxs's sake. LOL, Can hardly tpye for luahging

[ratcat]

All in good fun teylyn......and boredom can bring the best out of me and since I'm to lazy to google atm please enlighten me.

[teylyn]

ratcat, like here: http://smurfonspreadsheets.wordpress.../vsto-arrives/

[teylyn]

Martin, that was "saying no" very convincingly!

[ratcat]

Okay I like to make a comparison here...A comparison of other software so I can get me tiny brain about this concept you with to talk about.

FrontPage and VSTO are on one side and on the other side you have scripting code by yourself for the web page and VBA.

So is this right ???

[teylyn]

Uhmm, not really. FrontPage is Microsoft's somewhat challenged version of a WYSISYG editor for web sites. I don't want to open up the Pandora's Box about its drawbacks here, really.

VSTO is maybe best described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VSTO

It's kind of like this: the little kids use VBA, but real programmers (who don't eat quiche) use VSTO.

But with a price tag attached to the VSTO environment, it won't be available to just everyone, like VBA is currently.

So my question really is: Will VBA survive in the next few years, and is it worthwhile putting any effort into mastering it? Or will it be superseded by VSTO very quickly, and all the VBA studies will need to be biffed in order to start over with a VSTO and tabula rasa.

Shall I convince my boss to shell out for VSTO training while the budget is still there? (If only they could have found another name for the language. I mean, C#. Really. For a musician that's quite off-putting!!)

Or is it sufficient to check the local library and put a permanent hold on the VBA lit?

How much longer will VBA survive? What's your take?

[Domski]

I dabble with VBA and am very much still learning.

I recall seeing a discussion a few months ago along the similar lines on Mr Excel and pretty sure the MS MVP's who commented agreed that VBA would be around for a few years to come yet, the next couple of versions of MS Office at least.

As for whether it's worth learning it, I would say yes but I find it very useful for my job automating processes that would otherwise take hours if not days to do without it.

Dom

[teylyn]

the MS MVP's who commented agreed that VBA would be around for a few years to come yet

could be a case of wishful thinking .... But they're probably right. With all the VBA code floating around, it just wouldn't make sense if MS cut the support.

[Domski]

It's the only programming language I've ever tried to learn apart from some awful attempts at basic programming when I was at school so for the time being I hope it goes nowwhere. Saying that though as I'm the only person in my building who is even remotely competent with VBA converting all the macros to a new language could keep me in a job for a while at least.

Dom

[DonkeyOte]

95% of the companies don't have the resources available to move away from VBA - neither the manpower nor skillset.

Until such time as a tool is developed to "translate" VBA I can't see how it can be dropped, MS would simply risk losing too many customers and when you consider the sheer scale of what people can do using VBA developing any such tool seems remote.

I'm guessing MS will drop technical support for VBA at some point (VB6 is after all over ten years old and VBA is only a subset of that [PCs XL2000+]) ... though I suspect they will have to permit some sort of backwards compatibility, however, I'm still not sure how keenly people would take to even that concession.

.NET is undoubtedly the future (C / VB etc) but I think VBA knowledge will be a useful commodity for a while yet I'd say.


The MVPs will be off to Seattle soon so perhaps we can get them to ask MS bods directly and report back ?!

[romperstomper]

Everything I've seen indicates VBA will be around for at least the next two versions. If you consider the fact that XLM macros are still working (though not for much longer, I believe), I think VBA is safe for the time being - at least until they build a .Net macro recorder.
I would suspect that if they create a version of Office that doesn't support VBA in the next 5 to 10 years, it will be as popular as, well, Windows Vista.
Of course, VB.Net is not really that different from VBA, and you can do some really cool stuff much more easily with it.
I'm lucky though - I don't have to save up for it!