VBA and Civil 3D
Microsoft announced the discontinuation of the VBA licensing program in July of 2007. At that time, they stated, “Microsoft does not expect to make significant enhancements to VBA. This does not impact the current support commitments for VBA in any way, and of course, it does not impact any license arrangements that are in force. In particular, this does not impact VBA in Microsoft Office products.”
What does this mean to the AutoCAD user? Autodesk is constantly looking toward the future as well. As of the next release, VBA is not installed with AutoCAD.
That doesn’t mean it’s not supported per se. But if you open AutoCAD 2010 (which should begin shipping next month), and attempt the VBAIDE, VBAMAN, or VBARUN commands, you’ll be faced with a warning that “Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is no longer installed with AutoCAD.” They’ll provide you with a download link (http://www.autodesk.com/vba-download) but the link may not be active yet.
So what does this mean for Civil 3D users? Nothing. VBA is still installed with Civil 3D as it is required for some components to run. But I think the writing is on the wall; VBA is not the future. And why not? Partially because VBA is 32-bit.
For an excellent article about the history of VBA and Microsoft, click here. If you’re into programming, check out Joel Spolsky’s site “Joel on Software”. Joel was the Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team.
Cheers!
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This announcement by Microsoft marks a very important end to the era of the personal programmer, or at least as we have come to that description so far. VB was so radically different from the other languages available at the time that there were some who predicted all languages would take on the familiar drag and drop control placement combined with the ability to store reactions to events directly within the controls. A brave new world was predicted.
Due to it’s early relationship with excel the popularity of the little language who could exploded. By the time it reached AutoCAD, who already had a firmly entrenched AutoLISP following, and on the commercial software side already had companies using ADS C programming to produce their commercial software, VBA did not thrive as well in the CAD world as it had in its earlier days.
VBA unleashed the programmer in almost everyone who tried it, which is so foreign to Microsoft’s programming languages up to that point. Raise your hand if you have ever seen or worked with the MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) libraries. Its like they went into a room of programmers and look for those who had the hardest time describing common everyday items and said your perfect! Suffice to say that they don’t have the lexicon “Ease of Use” in their lexicon. To put it more sternly, their libraries of programming functions and concepts are so foreign to anything resembling the world we live in they should get some sort of prize for making the most insane choices in design of all time.
So how was it this dyslexic, socially backward, bashful, clumsy, sorta insane, totally freaky company who was creating the crappiest programming methods in the world able to develop one of the most world changing technologies humans have experienced in the last 30 years since the Personal Computer started it all? There has only been three or four technologies that have totally changed things. The personal computer, the graphical user interface, VBA, and nowadays, the iPhone. How could they ever have come together with enough imagination and forethought for the genius they were creating?
The didn’t. As with most large corporate juggarnauts, they didn’t innovate, they were stagnant. They didn’t invent, they spent. Microsoft bought the company who built the technology. Reminds me of another company…