Hi,

I don't think the way you classified the technologies is representative to what they are used for.

First, you forget VBScript, free run-time. And VB. Both can be used to automate Office applications.

Second VBA, for the most part, cannot be redistributed unless you are a licensee, and that's known to be very expensive. Because of that, writing VBA code is a way to embed VBA code in Office applications, not worry about deployment thanks to the fact it's embedded. Still macro security (certificates, ...) must be dealt with.

VSTO/VSTA play in a totally different league. First of all, those two are using .NET. And as everyone knows, .NET is that technology that Microsoft is not deploying on their own operating system, requiring in turn developers to do the heavy lifting for them. Of course, because .NET does not play well with unmanaged code (the VSTO/VSTA blogs are filled with those problems, and that's just a few), this is an entire new class of problems that arise from that. And worse, those problems come in addition to those from the unmanaged world, not instead of. In addition to this, VSTA will require a license and nobody knows at this point how costly it will be : will it be only a fraction of the VBA license?

VSTA is indeed in a different league. It solves lots of problems inherent to VBA. Calling unmanaged code with VSTA sure is not the best idea; mostly a bad application design symptom.

It is sad that the license pricing is still unknown. This has blocked adoption a great deal since ISVs don't know what they are stepping into. If MS is smart, licensing cost will be low and unobstrusive (not per seat!! some ISVs do not sell their own software per seat; we don't). VSTA can bring many ISVs to switch technology. We are mostly UNIX/JAVA folks but SQL2005/VSTA/etc is interessant enough to consider the switch...if the license price leaves enough air to do business;)

I will agree with the comments above.  In addition, I have seen many questions from DotNET developers asking the question, "If DotNET is so important to Microsoft, why are there no commercial Microsoft products that use DotNET?".   It makes us wonder, does Microsoft consider DotNET too slow, too weak, or what.

In regard to VSTO, why is the price for this so high?  The price leaves out the small companies.

Thanks for reading.
Tom

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