Disturbing VBA trends
November 17, 2009 • JP • No Comments • Rate This Article
I feel the need to comment after witnessing a few disturbing trends in the Office developer community.
- The news that the Office Developer Conference was folded into the SharePoint Conference.
- John Durant's odd defense of VBA
- This photo from the SharePoint Conference (originally from Gray Knowlton's blog):
Are there not enough attendees, or is Microsoft not interested enough in Office development (the way it's been the last few years anyway) to maintain a separate conference? This seems like the start of a trend of marginalizing Office development as we know it (although I'm sure others would say it's been going on far longer than that).
I like John Durant, but this defense comes off as weak. It ends up being a pitch for VSTO and/or .NET, and reeks of "pre-written." I feel like a player on a losing team whose coach is saying things like "it's OK, you played well and did your best." I like what Steve Schapel wrote about it, he called it "damning with faint praise" which could not sum up better what I see happening with Office development.
There's that faint praise again. If every Microsoft employee at the SharePoint Conference wore "I love macros" t-shirts, then maybe I would start believing in their commitment to keeping VBA in Office. But this doesn't inspire confidence in me at all.
On the other hand, Microsoft sponsored the last few UK Excel User Conferences, so maybe I'm just confused.
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An advice required:
With info like that, and somebody like me who is just a novice into VBA programming, would this be the right direction to be heading?
Or should I be investing my time on something more advantageous than VBA.
I would still say yes, but don't put all your eggs in one basket. Learn VB .NET or C# (or something else like Java or PHP) to fall back on, in case the career writing VBA doesn't work out.
They could have chosen a better colour for the t-shirts though, I bet the .Net boys had a field day.
BTW, MS did not sponsor the UK Excel Conference, they provided the venue and some basic facilities, but that was it. I am not complaining, it was very helpful and it is appreciate, but it seemed to be down to the efforts of a few of MS' employees, Vicki Collins, Akim Boukhelif and Phil Cross, I didn't see any corporate policy at work (other than maybe a policy to encourage the dissemination of information on MS products). The presenters paid ALL of their own costs, they were not subsidised FOR 1p.
Chrisham:
Learn VBA if it will help you now. That knowledge can be added and adapted later if you move in another direction.
If VBA is not that relevant to your current situation then look at visual studio express (free), I'd recommend C# as this is where MS seem to be focusing these days. Or one of the open source alternatives like php.
JP Office Marketing are not focusing on VBA in their marketing messages. at all! I think they wish we would go away, or move to VSTO.
"I think they wish we would go away, or move to VSTO."
Couldn't agree more.