Developing for Access with VSTO?

[jrbarnett]

Is anybody here developing code for Access using Visual Studio Tools for Office and one of the .NET languages?

Can you give any feedback here? Have you ported this code from VBA or was it written from scratch.

Any other comments would be welcome.

John

 

[bradles]

Good question John given the apparent shift coming from VBA to VSTO by Microsoft.

I've only dabbled in VSTO so far, with more effort into creating a VB.NET applications to replicate existing MS Access Applications and a couple of MS Word VBA template applications with some insights:
- Time taken VB.NET & VSTO : VBA = 5:1
- Data access via ADO.NET much slower than ADO or DAO for native MS Access Applications.
- Class inheritance in dotNET offers a lot, the least of which is extending controls for your needs.
- Outlook addins through VSTO are a snap, and creating VB.NET forms to extend Outlook a real pleasure. The issue here though is not using VBScript which is needed for some aspects of Outlook addins through VBA.

This in no way represents a definitive list and may of course relate to my deficiencies as a developer than anything to do with the technologies themselves (especially ADO.NET), but I did put some effort into reading and learning these new technologies.

And guess what, I'm back to MS Access & VBA for Word while still using VSTO for Outlook.

Brad

 

[jrbarnett]

I went to a Microsoft conference about Office Business Application Development in London, UK a few weeks ago. The impression I got from there was that VBA is very much dead in the water, and VB.Net wasn't used for any of the sample code (they were all C#). If MS themselves aren't using VB.Net in public demonstrations, it doesn't bode well for its long term future.

My concern is that while the tools to develop in VBA are included out of the box (VBA editor and help files) with Office up to and including 2007, if you want to use VSTO and .Net you need Office itself, plus Visual Studio and the VSTO tools, which costs money over and above the standard Office license, a far cry from being included.

If Office 2010 (or whatever follows 2007) removes the VBA editing tools or ability to run existing VBA then there will be a lot of upset people where I am - and a lot of work on my part to get the functionality via other means.

John

 

[JoeAtWork]

I wouldn't worry about VB.NET becoming a dead language. From what I've seen it's highly popular, probably because of ex-VB developers adopting it as their .NET language. In fact the ASP.NET books I've bought all either use VB.NET for the sample code, or at least samples in both VB.NET and C#.
I can't see VBA being pushed out too quickly - Microsoft's customers simply won't buy the new version if that is the case. They've already extended sales of Windows XP another six months due to customer demand (many companies are not yet willing to switch to Vista).