December 9, 2002

Visual Studio Tools for Office

Here. "Businesses and developers have long benefited from the ability to use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to customize Microsoft Office applications and integrate them with existing data and systems. While VBA continues to be an important part of Office development (and benefits from the new features of 'Office 11,' the next release of Office), 'Visual Studio Tools for Office' will provide significant advances in the areas of language choice and innovation, security, deployment, and the integrated development environment (IDE)." I once heard that most VB programmers are actually office programmers, so keeping them happy was *way* more important than keeping the average VB programmer happy, let alone a lowly C programmer. So, until .NET is ubiquitous and there's a seamless porting tool, looks like VBA and VSA will co-exist in Office instead of just having VSA replace VBA in a single version. This is goodness, imo.