News

VBA Licensing Expanded; New SDK Available

Bringing the familiarity and power of Microsoft applications to corporate developers, the software giant released a new Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) 6.0 Software Developers Kit (SDK) and a new licensing program today.

By embedding VBA into applications, developers can extend that app to pull features from software such as Excel and Word. Microsoft's previous licensing program gave that ability to ISVs who used it for packaged applications they would sell to customers.

The new "noncommercial" redistribution license for VBA enables corporations to develop VBA-based applications for internal use. Microsoft also released new technologies as part of the VBA 6.0 SDK that aims to simplify VBA integration for developers. Those include a new wizard for integrating VBA into Visual Basic-based apps, additional sample code and more comprehensive documentation.

"VBA technology has been widely adopted by software vendors who recognize the benefits of delivering fully customizable applications," says Tod Nielson, vice president of developer marketing at Microsoft, in a press release. "With this new licensing structure, corporations can now integrate VBA into their internally created applications, resulting in reduced development cycles and solutions that can be customized to meet organizational needs more specifically."

The new VBA SDK is free of charge and can be downloaded from the Microsoft Web site (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vba/). Information on licensing and technical support can also be found there. -- Brian Ploskina

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.