I'm still waiting for a decent explanation of why VBA is being discontinued, in the first place. The first reason given, if I remember correctly, was that Microsoft was getting rid of VBA. Microsoft has said, very clearly, that they have no plans to discontinue VBA in the Office suite, and that existing partners can continue to ship VBA. Directly from an MS Blog (
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsto/archive/2008/01/16/the-reports-of-vba-s-demise-have-been-greatly-exagge..."Any existing partner can continue to ship VBA and Microsoft Office will continue to include it."
I have tried writing code in VB.net and Python, and it just isn't as good. It is so much more difficult to debug code when using .net to develop extensions or scripts in ArcMap, and Python doesn't offer the same abilities, with no access to ArcObjects. I have a solid programming background, so this is not simply a matter of someone complaining about problems caused by them not understanding what they're doing. Seems like a case of "change for the sake of change."
Why take away something that is working so well for so many users?
At a minimum, I would like an honest and reasonable explanation about why VBA is going away in ArcGIS.