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by don-bright 27 days ago
It's not dead. It's included with every copy of Desktop Excel and probably will be for 20 years. Press Alt-F11 and away you go (enable Developer tab first i guess?). Forms, SQL connectors, collections, alot of other stuff even XML parsing is in there somewhere if you dig around enough.

I mean it's like. not being developed anymore and not added to, and its a pain to have it deal with modern stuff like https but. yeah. its only mostly dead.
2 comments
ChristopherDrum 27 days ago
That would be Visual Basic for Applications, not the full-featured Visual Basic, if I'm not mistaken. I don't think it's possible to save out standalone executables that can run on machines that don't have Excel (or perhaps other Office apps), since its purpose is for Office automation scripting.
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vic20forever 27 days ago
You are correct. But, that's about the only difference between VBA and VB. I was a VB developer for 10 years before I wrote my first VBA application (in Excel), and I was surprised when everything I tried to do in VBA just worked(TM).
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pjmlp 27 days ago
There are plenty more like VB 5 and 6 changed component architecture from VBX, to OCX (COM based), while adding features to do COM development in VB directly.

VB 5 introduced proper AOT compilation, based on VC++ backend, which was further improved in VB 6.

The debugger / REPL experience was much better on VB than VBA.

You cannot really use most VB components in Excel / VBA unless AddIn support is enabled.

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WillAdams 27 days ago
For a bit of the background on that development see:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

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