On Thu, 28 Apr 2005 06:49:22 -0500, Ralph wrote:

>You can either get out your wallet and join step with M$ (foregoing all
>previous assets) or find another path. They could care less.

"Mike Cox" <mikecoxlinux@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:427081db_2@x-privat.org...
> Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office and VB/VBA were the pillars of
> Microsoft's dominance. EOLing VB is taking out a crucial pillar of its
> success.
>
> VB's ease of development and RAD helped Windows corner the market. How
> many applications for business were written in VBA? Countless. It was
the
> tight integration of VB, Office and Windows that put MS on the map in the
> corporate world. In my business I have rarely seen any company use Office
> COM objects programatically using C++. It was all VBA and VB.
>
> Actually, I've tried developing with Office using VC++. The system calls
> are NOT EVEN DOCUMENTED in MSDN!!!! One must guess by looking at the names
> to see if the functions are the equivalent of their VBA counterparts! You
> have to use the COM OLE Viewer and open the office tlb file and guess the
> corrosponding C++ COM functions to the VB ones. Sometimes the names are
> similar and sometimes not.
>
> It was these custom VB/VBA business apps that put MS into the corporate
> desktop and that's what is currently keeping the competition (including
> Linux) at bay.
>

Mike Cox wrote:
> Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office and VB/VBA were the pillars of
> Microsoft's dominance. EOLing VB is taking out a crucial pillar of
> its success.