Yes I agree, that's certainly one of the important changes to be made, and given the .Net Framework I think it's inevitable, but I'm not holding my breath as I'm not convinced there'll be a vba.Net. I look forward to dropping TWIPs not just from a form point of view but anything graphical. I work mostly in .Net now, so moving back and forth twixt the two is a strain for my brain.

I wonder what the .Net conversion of office will bring if it ever comes. It moves code much further away from the ethos of Office development and beyond many companies investment in vba technologies.

This presents Microsoft with a heck of a dilemma, Office is the big money spinner for MS, millions of vba developers out there writing mission critical software on a technology that is already out of date. It's ok to expect a programmer to get training and keep up, but if you're a financial analyst whose job description does not include writing code but loves doing it and saves thousands a year doing it, how are you going to convince your boss you should go on a .Net course? I have first hand experience of this (not moving to .Net but vb6, asp and c++), I had to battle with my bosses to be allowed to develop code and was lucky to intercept a quote from a partner company for ?300k that I managed to deliver in one week (no brainer for an IT Director). Before I took a job as a developer I was a Project Manager, I used to have to sneak onto the likes of Excel-L, VISBAS-L and MrExcel when no one
was looking, I suspect this is still the case for many people. VBA has become a rod for Microsofts own back.

I wonder if vba will just evolve in it's current form and not move to .Net as you can easily create Office solutions in vb.Net or C# using Office 2003 and Visual Studio.Net 2003, leaving VBA alone allows non .Net developers to carry on using vba. Maybe there'll be vba and vba.net implemented side by side. MS will have to address it at some point, Longhorn continues support for COM and OLE but it
doen't extend them, and the official line is they are 'done' technologies.

Maybe .Net will skip Office in it's current form and wait for a new type of Office application that isn't an eclectic mish mash of applications masquerading as a suite, but a single application that incorporates all the functionality an Office user would ever use. The official line from MS is that they will support vba after integrating .Net into office, even though they don't know how they're going to do that.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that vba would still be around for two full product cycles of Office from XP, so that's one down, one to go... one things for sure, vba will be around for longer than that because if they break it, people just won't move. My old company (7000 desktops) upgraded their Office suite last year, from Office 95.