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Developing with Office 2000

July 9 - Kay Ewbank talks to Mike Gilbert, Microsoft product manager for Visual Basic for Applications.

Kay: With the recent release of Office 2000 Developer, there's a lot of interest at Tech Ed in Office development. What's the message that you want to get across to the delegates?

Mike: Office 2000 is a milestone release architecturally. From an end user perspective, it's taken a while to get products in line - from a platform perspective too. Now there are lots of components exposed, it interacts with the Web very well, and what we want to get across to developers is that, as you're out there developing your enterprise systems, there's a big role for Office to play, along with your Web apps, and your IT infrastructure.
      Office is the application that's on every desktop, and it provides a great starting point. Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is one of the most popular developer tools and, with the new Office Developer edition, there are some great facilities for you to use.

Kay: Taking one of the new facilities - the ability to create COM add-ins - do you think you've made it accessible enough for Office developers?

Mike: Our division really only looks at professional developers. I do think it will be mainly of interest to professional developers, but there are a lot of them out there, using Office and VBA to build fairly large, robust systems. They will appreciate the COM add-in, and for some it might be enough to justify them moving across.

Kay: Do you anticipate any annoyance about the fact that there's yet another change, this time with the addition of support for OLE DB, the inclusion of the Microsoft Data Engine, and the focus on ADO rather than DAO and RDO?

Mike: On the object model side, Microsoft has taken a look outside the company and has tried to make the facilities more generally useful and robust. The addition of OLE DB and ADO will make the software more generally useful, and I think that will be appreciated.
    On the data engine side, yes, it might take some education before developers appreciate the advantages. Prior to MSDE, developers had to make a choice. If you wanted something local and easy, you'd look to Access, to the Jet engine. From the high end you had to look to SQL Server. There's a middle group who needed the power of SQL Server, but who were trapped with Jet and faced a major rewrite. Once you hit that wall, it was hard to get to the next stage.
      MSDE gives a way to start locally, with low overheads, then when there's a need to move to a larger system, to upsize to SQL Server. It will make it a lot easier to develop and deploy, and to decide as the needs grow whether to scale.

Kay: So will MSDE replace Jet?

Mike: Jet will still be supported, we're continuing to maintain it, there's a new version under development. MSDE will probably be refined in later versions to be more Jet-like. This is the first version. We want to see how it goes with the desktop user, the type of system where there's no database administrator to manage things. However, if you look at the grander scheme of things, especially as the versions get more insulated from what's under the covers, then for most developers the underlying data engine becomes less important.

Kay: There are still some differences in the way VBA works between the different applications in Office. I know that this is because a Word document, say, has less structure than an Excel Worksheet, but what's been happening to make the differences less noticeable?

Mike: There are actually some good moves on this front. We obviously have to have backwards compatibility, but where the problems arise through the differences between document formats, the rise in importance of HTML as an object model for the document means that in the future we will have a much more consistent view across the applications, with ideas such as cascading style sheets providing communality.
    Overall, what we want to say is, things will continue to improve, but the platform is mature enough, and the tools are there now, so we hope even more people will go out there and use it.

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