Disadvantages of bigger project in VBA

Question

i am new in project for company that have bigger enterprise/accounting system based on Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in Ms Access 97. This application is still alive, they

Answer 1

1. No. It is Visual Basic for Applications and it does exactly that, provide an interface for COM objects and macros.

2. I would start moving towards WPF as it will be the more future proof of the two choices, but if your stuck supporting machines not yet running XP Sp2 you'll need to use WinForms (though I highly doubt this scenario). VB.Net might be a good starting point for all the useful dodads in the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace.

3. Yes, start breaking out the solution into seperate .vba and .mod files and introducing source control. However, by this point you should consider migrating your developers to VB.Net or C#.

4. VBA is pretty much stuck on single threaded execution. Visual Studio Tools for Office when used in conjunction with VB.Net and C# is missing functionality present by directly using VBA.

5. Sort of. See VBAUnit.

Something to keep in mind is that VB6 hit end of life in 2008, and VBA is still included for Office 2010, but it is being encouraged that developers use VSTA instead. Administrators used to use batch files and VBA scripts, but Powershell is slowly but surely replacing that type of implementation. Basically, VBA will still work, but there are newer (and probably better) ways of doing things (that wont hit end of life soon).