Visual Basic IDE Lives On in Office for Mac -- Visual Studio Magazine

Visual Basic IDE Lives On in Office for Mac

By David Ramel
08/07/2017

The 26-year-old Visual Basic programming language just won't go away, as Microsoft just announced plans to bring its IDE back to the Office for Mac environment.

"Many of you have noticed the limited Visual Basic development environment that shipped with Office 2016 for Mac, and have asked for the full environment to make its way back to the Mac," Microsoft announced last week. "Later this fall we will indeed be releasing an update that includes the full editor, including multiple code windows, breakpoints, watches, the Object Browser, and more!"

While no specific date in the fall was mentioned for general availability, the VB IDE will reportedly be released within a month to the Office Insider Fast program, for users seeking the earliest preview builds on a frequent basis in order to identify issues, provide feedback help improve Office.

While Visual Basic won't be available for OneNote and Outlook for Mac, the other Office for Mac components -- including Word, Excel and PowerPoint -- will include the full-blown VB IDE.

**[Click on image for larger view.]** The Visual Basic IDE *(source: Microsoft).*

The fall release wont' feature the regular IDE's Forms Designer, though that's planned for future iterations, along with the other aforementioned features.

Microsoft published a silent YouTube video showing the IDE in action, along with some still-existing bugs.

Visual Basic, despite debuting in 1991, still enjoys a strong developer following, with any related news nearly guaranteed to generate a lot of interest -- for example, check out the commentary thread on our recent article, "Viva, Visual Basic! Or, Does VB Have a Future?"

Apparently that question has been answered.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Compare New GitHub Copilot Free Plan for Visual Studio/VS Code to Paid Plans

The free plan restricts the number of completions, chat requests and access to AI models, being suitable for occasional users and small projects.
Diving Deep into .NET MAUI

Ever since someone figured out that fiddling bits results in source code, developers have sought one codebase for all types of apps on all platforms, with Microsoft's latest attempt to further that effort being .NET MAUI.
Copilot AI Boosts Abound in New VS Code v1.96

Microsoft improved on its new "Copilot Edit" functionality in the latest release of Visual Studio Code, v1.96, its open-source based code editor that has become the most popular in the world according to many surveys.
AdaBoost Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the AdaBoost.R2 algorithm for regression problems (where the goal is to predict a single numeric value). The implementation follows the original source research paper closely, so you can use it as a guide for customization for specific scenarios.
Versioning and Documenting ASP.NET Core Services

Building an API with ASP.NET Core is only half the job. If your API is going to live more than one release cycle, you're going to need to version it. If you have other people building clients for it, you're going to need to document it.