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Microsoft Says VBA Is Here To Stay
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Jan 18, 2008 09:24 AM
from the thought-we'd-seen-the-back-of-it dept.
from the thought-we'd-seen-the-back-of-it dept.
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."
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VBA Going Away, Macs Now, PCs Soon 255 comments
Nom du Keyboard writes "As Microsoft drops support for older Office file formats, it looks like Visual Basic for Applications is also going soon. Mac Office 2008 has dropped VBA in favor of enhanced support for AppleScript, and Office 2009 is scheduled to lose it in favor of Mac incompatible Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) or Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). This sounds like the Mother of All Backwards and Cross-Platform Incompatibilities — especially since there appears to be no transition period where both the old and new scripting languages will be simultaneously supported. And as past experience with Visual Studio .NET has shown, upgrade tools are far less than perfect."
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Microsoft Says VBA Is Here To Stay
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So Microsoft is at least still a *little* evil (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So Microsoft is at least still a *little* evil (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
that was a close one. (Score:5, Insightful)
ISOfication of OOXML vs VBA (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:ISOfication of OOXML vs VBA (Score:5, Insightful)
If history is any judge, many VBA apps will one day not work in future versions of Office anyhow. MSFT does plenty to break compatibility between releases. In fact, some VBA apps developed for Office 97 won't work on Office 2000 or later.
Parent
Re:ISOfication of OOXML vs VBA (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, that should happen sooner rather than later, so this announcement is a retrograde step.
DDE, OLE, COM and DCOM are fundamentally flawed models which were developed in a much less fraught security environment than we have now. VBA is heavily tied into that same flawed architecture.
Microsoft has tried to address the exposures by disabling macros by default in Office, but the control they provide isn't fine-grained enough to do more than pass the buck to the customers who have to enable the lower security levels to get their documents working.
They do have an answer in .NET, but until Office is re-written for that platform, and until there's some sort of converter for the massive collection of existing VBA to VBA.NET, they're stuck with the risky and clunky security fix.
Parent
Of course,MS is catering to their real customers (Score:5, Interesting)
Interestingly enough:...
Looks like MS may be crippling the Mac version to stop enterprises from moving on from Windows.
Re:Of course,MS is catering to their real customer (Score:4, Insightful)
Vista needs some competitive advantage over MacOS X, I guess. Since OpenOffice supports it, though, I suspect most Mac users would rather give up MS Office than MacOS when possible. Considering the Mac is growing 2-3x the industry rate, tying Office to Windows in this manner is just Microsoft nailing one more nail in their own coffin.
Parent
That's not the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
They want the damn ribbon to go away!
VBA for Mac (Score:5, Interesting)
Would have been a mixed blessing (Score:4, Insightful)
I absolutely hate VBA but it's conflicted because I've made so much money untangling some spaghetti coded VBA nightmare cobbled together as a spare time project that became a legacy application no one can live without.
Hate the language, love the money from fixing it.
Actually, no. Did you RTFA before submitting? (Score:5, Informative)
Am I missing something here?
Re:Actually, no. Did you RTFA before submitting? (Score:4, Insightful)
"The facts you cited are right - but your logical conclusion was wrong. We're Microsoft and we are not bound by logic."
Basically.
=tkk
Parent
Well, that doesn't matter (Score:1, Insightful)
Mac users only eh? (Score:1)
Conspiracy theories aside it could just be they are going to keep the support for Legacy systems but don't want to keep up with that junk for mac users, maybe it's harder to implement on the back end?
How about using .Net? (Score:4, Insightful)
Since
Most of the work is in fact already done. The Microsoft.Office.* hierarchy already exists in
Re:How about using .Net? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
A limerick (Score:1)
Microsoft said it was here to stay,
First they denied it, the community despised it, we can only home its deprecated.
Still... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or Mac users could refuse en masse to "upgrade" to this "downgrade".
Oh well. (Score:1)
Boggled (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2006/08/08/saying-goodbye-to-visual-basic/ [schwieb.com]
Which makes it very clear that there are good technological reasons for dropping it. Or, at least, it's going to be such a huge amount of work to bring it natively to Intel that it's not worth it to MS.
I mean, sure, some people at MS may be happy about it vanishing, but it doesn't sound like a conspiracy to me...
I somehow don't believe it (Score:2)
If VBA is actually here to stay, I say the telltale sign will be if VBA support is included in the NEXT version of Mac Office X. That is called backtracking.
My thoughts in lyrical form (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTZ2xpQwpA [youtube.com]
(If you don't know, now you know)
VBA
So many people writing code in vain
VBA
Debugging apps is really quite a pain
VBA
Microsoft says it will not support
VBA
To C#, functionality we'll port
VBA
No rhyme or reason to deploy this mess
VBA
A seasoned coder really could care less
VBA
Slashdot will flame Microsoft either way
VBA
Now I'm confused why it is here to stay
May Deny But Intentions Are Clear (Score:2, Interesting)
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:
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.
If it's 'here to stay'... (Score:2)
VBA! Yay! (Score:1)
That would be suicidal in Excel case. (Score:2, Interesting)
VBA Went Too Far (Score:2, Insightful)
Which meant it was ripe for abuse and overuse. Too many companies have important, business critical functions/logic entombed in Excel 'macros', or Access 'applications'.
If I've understood MS's intentions, they want all office programming to be done within
Cue the Yack-son 5 (Score:2, Funny)
Easy as one, two, thray,
Do arrays the mangled way,
Rather Python any day,
Market penetration means you stay,
OK, this post is turni--
Parent
Mod AC Up (Score:2)
Parent