Microsoft Developers are not happy about the demise of classic Visual Basic 6 in favor of Visual Basic.NET. Microsoft developers,even 225 MVPs, have continued the protest. Microsofts key executives in charge of development have rejected those requests and promised better conversion utilities and advice. Not what the developers wanted to hear … but end of story.
Well … No.
Microsoft must have close to 400 ISVs including a number of its own internal Office applications which use VBA. Say each of those ISVs average 300,000 macro programs out in their user community – that would be 10 different macros for 30,000 users on average. Not a stretch and probably way low for Word, Excel, Photoshop, Word Perfect, etc users. So when Office 12 with Longhorn appears – what is going to happen to VBA – is it going to become VBA.NET ? Are 120 million++ users of VBA macro going to be confronted with the same conversion headaches that classic Visual Basic users have been confronted with ? Or is VBA going to be allowed to persist and carry the Classic VB torch ? VBA is obviously not identically VB6; but it has most of the GUI components and much of the ease of programming structure that makes Classic VB so popular.
Will VBA developers be allowed to create a standalone version of the product ? Will Microsoft management kill two birds with one stone – reconciling VB developer concerns while solving a pressing problem for millions of its and its ISVs VBA users. Stay tuned.
(c)JBSurveyer 2005