Future
As of July 1, 2007, Microsoft no longer offers VBA distribution licenses to new customers. Microsoft intended to add .NET-based languages to the current version of VBA ever since the release of the .NET Framework, of which versions 1.0 and 1.1 included a scripting runtime technology named Script for the .NET Framework. Visual Studio .NET 2002 and 2003 SDK contained a separate scripting IDE called Visual Studio for Applications (VSA) that supported VB.NET. One of its significant features was that the interfaces to the technology were available via Active Scripting (VBScript and JScript), allowing even .NET-unaware applications to be scripted via .NET languages. However, VSA was deprecated in version 2.0 of the .NET Framework, leaving no clear upgrade path for applications desiring Active Scripting support (although "scripts" can be created in C#, VBScript, and other .NET languages, which can be compiled and executed at run-time via libraries installed as part of the standard .NET runtime).
Support for VBA in the Mac OS X version of Microsoft Office was dropped (for one version) with the release of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac. The official reason given was that VBA relied heavily on machine code written for the PowerPC architecture, and that rewriting this code for dual PowerPC/Intel architectures would have added another 2 years to the development of the suite. However, the Office suite can be automated via AppleScript to an extent. VBA was restored in Microsoft Office for Mac 2011. Microsoft has clearly stated that they have no plans to remove VBA from the Windows version of Office.
With Office 2010, Microsoft has introduced VBA7 which now contains a true pointer data type: LongPtr. This new data type allows referencing 64-bit address space. The 64-bit install of Office 2010 does not support common controls of MSComCtl (TabStrip, Toolbar, StatusBar, ProgressBar, TreeView, ListViews, ImageList, Slider, ImageComboBox) or MSComCt2 (Animation, UpDown, MonthView, DateTimePicker, FlatScrollBar) so legacy 32-bit code ported to 64-bit VBA code that depends on these common controls will not function. The 32-bit version of Office 2010 is unaffected by this issue. VBA7 includes no 64-bit version of the common controls, so it leaves developers with no means to migrate VBA applications to 64-bits. Microsoft suggests contacting the software vendor for 64-bit versions of VBA controls.
Read more about this topic: Visual Basic For Applications
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“We must choose. Be a child of the past with all its crudities and imperfections, its failures and defeats, or a child of the future, the future of symmetry and ultimate success.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)
“The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.”
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975)
“If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end,
The future might stop emerging out of the past,
Out of what is full of us; yet the search
And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)