Catherine Heller: VSTO Demo

I still use VBA for my Microsoft Word jaunts. And, as Microsoft’s Catherine Heller suggests on Channel9.msdn.com, the next version of VSTO will not radically revisit the extremely complex, application object model covered by VBA. It appears that the next version of VSTO is preoccupied with all the stuff shown on Channel9 and the ‘boring’ task of making sure that managed code safely and completely replaces VBA appears to be an obscure edge case that about which ‘our’ Mort cares little. I do not find it impossible that Microsoft will abandon VBA (and VBA-replication) entirely and force us to wait several years before there is a suitable replacement—an equivalent to what we now call “managed.” One possible path is that Office 14 (or maybe Office 12) will run entirely on managed code and Microsoft will simply say, “Upgrade your documents to the new file format and write your new managed code against the new managed object model.” Microsoft will be successful in file-format backwards compatibility but the code will have to be rewritten—even code written in C# or VB.NET for VSTO 1.x.

Brice It wrote:

RASX:::

What on earth is wrong with managed code? What is your beef with VBA being ported as managed code into Visual Studio?

/// <summary>

/// Returns a data-only Word XML string.

/// from the specified Word XML Node.

/// </summary>

/// <param name="XmlNode">Word XML Node</param>

/// <remarks>

/// Unfortunately the C# version of VSTO 1.x does not support

/// the <c>Word.XMLNode.XML()</c> method and its "raw getter" is exposed

/// for our temporary use.

/// </remaarks>

internal static string GetXml(Word.XMLNode XmlNode)

{

return XmlNode.get_XML(true);

}

What's "wrong" with get_XML()? In VBA, it's XmlNode.XML(true). What I need to hear is that Microsoft is eager to hide the "raw getter" get_XML() and wrap it up in XML(). What may really happen, is that this syntax will be replaced with an entirely different approach that is not compatible with VBA (and VSTO 1.x's incomplete translation of VBA functionality).