Comments on: VBA IDE vs VS2008 IDE

By: The Ken Puls Blog » Blog Archive » PED 2nd Edition â€“ Hello World!

The Ken Puls Blog » Blog Archive » PED 2nd Edition â€“ Hello World! — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 04:08:59 +0000

[...] VBA IDE vs VS2008 IDE [...]

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:57:18 +0000

“I think MS has learned some lessons about the transition from VB6 to VB.NET and what they did not do well there.”

I’m skeptical. I also hope they’ve learned lessons from the 2003-to-2007 “upgrade”. I have clients who have yelled at me about their frustration. “You’re an MVP, you should have told them it sucked.” Well, I am and I did, but the PTB/PHB (powers that be/pointy haired bosses) had already set the wheels in motion.

By: Ken Puls

Ken Puls — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:19:18 +0000

Honestly, I couldn’t say. It kind of depends if there is something in the newer versions that they want to take advantage of, I guess. When the potential of the new features outstrips the pain of coding a workaround, then I would guess that most people would make the switch. I’m sure that there would always be some though…

By: JP

JP — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:12:17 +0000

Ken,

There are things you can still only do using Excel 4 macros (Which things specifically, escapes me at the moment). If MS stops supporting it, do you think most people will simply stop upgrading?

By: Ken Puls

Ken Puls — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:59:45 +0000

@ Mike

This is just my opinion, but I think MS has already done about as much for VB6 to VB.NET migration as they are going to do. The world has been on notice for a long time that they should be moving on to VB.NET (when it makes sense for them.) How long that transition takes in truth is really anyone’s guess though. MS could build VB6 capability into Windows 14 and someone would still be choked when it was pulled in 15, right?

With regards to VBA, and again, just my opinion… I think MS has learned some lessons about the transition from VB6 to VB.NET and what they did not do well there. I hope that means good things for our inevitable transition. I don’t think that VBA will be going anywhere in the short term though. We’re have Excel 14 on the horizon, and yet we still have support for XL4 macros at least as far as 13. I’m sure that VBA will continue in the product to give people sufficient time to migrate properly. Having said that, these are merely my musings and may not bear any resemblance to reality.

@JP I’m using VS 2008 Pro. It’s a big program, to be sure, and I’ve only just cracked the tip of it. But the stuff I’ve seen makes so much of the writing easier that it’s amazing.

By: JP

JP — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:22:36 +0000

Isn’t it great? Which VS do you have? Express?

I love the IDE. The error msgs are much more suggestive than the usual VBA IDE error msgs. If your method is overloaded, you can cycle through each method until you find the one you want. And the arguments have tooltips.

By: Mike Woodhouse

Mike Woodhouse — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:41:05 +0000

Ah, but to pimp the VBA IDE, which hasn’t changed in about a decade, would be to invest in VB6, which has been effectively dead since ’98. IDE state-of-the-artfulness has moved on a bit since then.

I’m still curious to see how MS will deal with the eventual demise of VBA and how (if) they’ll address the billions(? my guess) of lines of VB6 code that exist – and continue to be written – in the real world.