whats the difference between VB and VBA?

[iknowu99]

I am still learning about the programming side, I would like to know what is the primary difference between VB .NET and VBA? I have not done VB.NET before but I might be asked to do some new project and I am not familiar...from what I understand it is tied to Oracle? please elaborate? thank you

 

[Joe4]

There have been a handful of discussions on this topic over the years. Here are a few of them:

http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthread.php?t=173271
http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthread.php?t=258800
http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthread.php?t=411885
http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthread.php?t=306975

I'm sure you could probably also find a bunch of other discussions on the web with a simple Google search.

 

[iknowu99]

thank you. good read with variety of people with dif skill levels.

When can we expect to have VBA create stand alones? it seems like this is the only significant downfall of VBA...and even then exe files are for windows OS and most Windows OS have office anyways...just chatting to myself here

I'm still trying to understand, what is the .Net advantage over VBA? there are numerous .NET Frameworks that have been installed on my WindowsXP from the AutomaticUpdates...I'm wondering what kind of libraries are these, and what new things are the .NET developers using that we dont see in VBA?

 

[SydneyGeek]

When can we expect to have VBA create stand alones? it seems like this is the only significant downfall of VBA...and even then exe files are for windows OS and most Windows OS have office anyways...just chatting to myself here

VBA will never create stand-alone apps; it's designed to work in the context of the application that it comes with.

I'm still trying to understand, what is the .Net advantage over VBA? there are numerous .NET Frameworks that have been installed on my WindowsXP from the AutomaticUpdates...I'm wondering what kind of libraries are these, and what new things are the .NET developers using that we dont see in VBA?

.NET is a much broader (and more general) development framework than VBA, because it lets you create stand-alone desktop or web-based applications. You can use VB.NET or C# to build .NET apps, and just one of its capabilities is being able to automate Office applications, using a toolset called VSTO. If you mostly work in non-Office environments and need to occasionally do stuff with Excel (for instance), use .NET. If you work mostly or entirely in Office applications, and don't need to create stand-alone apps, stick with VBA.

Denis