What Is the Future of VBA? [closed]

Question

With the new 2007 versions of MS-Office, Microsoft started to "threaten" VBA with VSTA. Since VBA is pretty commonly used, what do you believe its future is in terms of scripting development for the next 3-5 years?

Or, will it be killed suddenly, like VB6?

Autodesk also dropped it (kind of) upon hearing news from MS.

Answer 1

I'd suggest that VB6 wasn't killed suddenly. Official MS support, perhaps, but still the community is alive for both VB6 and VBA here on SO.

As with any technology with a WIDE user/customer/3rd party vendor base, it will take a long time for VBA as a scripting technology to fade away. I would imagine that it will take years for its successor to fully overtake VBA.

Answer 2

Agree with Dick Kusleika about deployment

The problems with deprecating VBA are:

1. Ease of deployment
2. Visual Studio - another IDE to learn
3. For the huge base of working, business-critical VBA apps, where nothing will be added by .NET, why would one want to spend the effort and time migrating?
4. With VBA, non-developers can knock up quick useful applications within Excel/Word etc. You can't do this with .NET/VSTO.