Craig Bailey on Microsoft

Last weekend I presented at Office DevCon on the topic of VSTO for VBA developers.

This is an interesting use case because you essentially have a group of very experienced, highly productive developers, all extremely familiar with their technology. So my aim was to look at how Microsoft is supporting this community (as opposed to say pushing them into a new technology). I chatted about this previously.

The key is VBA / VSTO Interop, which allows VBA code to easily call VSTO code and vice versa.

The benefit of this approach is that VBA developers can (and should) continue to use their existing skill-set primarily, and easily take advantage of the .NET VSTO stuff in bite sized chunks when appropriate. There’s no either/or scenario here, it is very much one of complementing each other.

My presentation is available on my SkyDrive here, and I’ve recorded an 11 minute demo of how VBA and VSTO can call each other (its an Excel example, and is very much based on Daniel Moth’s excellent demo, which I referred to back in July). It also demos how bad my typing is :-)

I recorded this with Camtasia and left in many of the zoom-n-pan effects. Tell me if it’s too much.