Home |
Search |
Today's Posts |
#1
Posted to microsoft.public.excel.programming
|
|||
|
|||
Dilettante Question: VBA to VB.Net?
On May 26, 5:13 am, "Peter T" <peter_t@discussions wrote:
There is a certain overhead required for any VB.Net project that is not needed in VBA because of the linkage. A VB.Net requires an assembly to accompany the Excel parts. Any pre Win XP OS user (eg Win 2000) might need to download and install the 32Mb Framework (the older v2.0). Regards, Peter T "Jon Peltier" wrote in message ... Before you embark on such a journey, you have to ask yourself what you hope to gain, and what you hope not to lose, by switching. VB.Net can certainly be used to automate Excel, but as you say, it is not linked in the same way to Excel as is VBA; in fact there is some kind of PIA required, or a shim, or some such. There is a certain overhead required for any VB.Net project that is not needed in VBA because of the linkage. A VBA solution is as easy as one workbook that contains some VBA code. A VB.Net requires an assembly to accompany the Excel parts. A VBA solution can be deployed as simply as emailing a workbook. A VB.net-based Office solution, well, suffice to say that programmers have reported problems with this kind of solution. - Jon ------- Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP Tutorials and Custom Solutions Peltier Technical Services, Inc. -http://PeltierTech.com _______ wrote in message ... I program, but I am not a programmer. Please forgive me if this question is simplistic or naïve. I am thinking of transitioning from VBA to VB.net. However, since VBA is tightly bound to Excel the development process is very efficient because I can quickly iterate back and forth between a worksheet and the design space to converge on the solution. I downloaded Visual Studio .Net Express as a starting point. But it is not clear to me that there is an equivalent way to lash up VB.net to Excel. Can somebody point me to some documentation that explains if and how that can be done? And while you are at it, is it worth the effort? Thanks Much, SteveM I sincerely appreciate the advice from all of the guys here. Let me close this thread with an editorial rant. Recently my stars became dysfunctionally aligned and I had to immerse myself in many things Microsoft. The universal observation I can make about the product suite is that every application is half-baked. (Or as my dear departed dad would say, "half-assed".) I recently installed Office 2007 Professional Edition. What a can of worms I opened. I am running it on XP but it still runs like a bloated leviathan. And the fact that there isn't commonality among the interfaces of the different applications is ridiculous. Why are there fonts available in PowerPoint but not Word? How come the Outlook is half 2003 and half 2007? Why is Microsoft pushing Visual Studio but not bothering to do the replacement integration of Studio for VBA? My version of Office came with a copy of the Microsoft Groove product, which looked to be a really interesting application for a small consulting practice like I have. In fact that's Microsoft's target market for the product, families and small business to facilitate collaboration. But after I install that additional memory hog, I see that it comes with essentially no templates and everything that I would want to do, I have to develop from scratch. A search of the web space for Groove users surfaces all of these developers writing complex code in Studio and Silver Light to insert the functionality that should have been there in the first place. I can write code, but I would use a product like Groove so I wouldn't have to write code! The next wildly corpulent Microsoft application I had the stupidity to install was Expression Web. Because I wanted to build a website for my business. And why Expression Web? Because little did I know that the Office 2007 install would zotz my copy of Frontline. So I download the 700 MB msi file and do the install yielding an application that has just chewed up 1.1 GB of my hard drive. 1.1 GB to modify a webpage template! I subsequently downloaded a open-source webpage editor called Kompozer that does what I need to do. 20 MB - and free. And I found an open source collaborative platform called Moodle that is free and has developers porting all kinds of plug-ins. Why doesn't someone just put a bullet through Groove's head and have the programmers spruce up Moodle whose fundamental functionality is already there? And lastly, my tar baby relationship with Microsoft applications often takes me to their website. And I find all kinds of help pages with arcane examples written by geeks for geeks. To say nothing of the myriad web obsolete pages and countless links to nowhere. If I could go back in time, I would do three things for sure. Kill Hitler, save the dinosaurs, and run Bill Gates over with a bus. SteveM |
Reply |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
Display Modes | |
|
|