VB Forum / Database Access / October 2006

There are very few comparisons between the two languages, beyond sharing
basic keywords, conditional statements, the fact they both use objects, and
you get to click the mouse a lot.

There is going to be a large learning curve to dotNet, period. A dotNet
language is only part of it - the Framework, new designers, new data access,
etc. will all have greater impact.

Whether or not knowing VBA before hand would provide any advantage would be
tough to measure - I'll guess, and give you a two-week headstart over
someone who has never seen any dialect of VB previously.

-ralph

I eventually got round to posting in the right newsgroup and got this  
useful response
(My question was 'what is the difference between vb, vb.net, and vba?'):

They have been obfuscated to an extent by Microsoft, but broadly it is  
this.

VB is the name given to the older versions of Visual Basic, up to and
including VB6 which was released in about 1998.

VB.NET is the name generally given to more recent versions of Visual Basic
released from 2000 onwards, and which make use of the .net framework.
Although VB.NET is claimed by Microsoft to be an update to VB, they aren't
all that compatible and you should be wary about attempting to port any
project of significant size from VB6 to any later version.

The obfuscation creeps in because Microsoft calls the most recent version
"VB2005", dropping the .net suffix from the name even though it uses the
VB.NET syntax, not the VB6 syntax.

VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is the version of VB that is included
inside various of the Microsoft Office applications, and is also licensed  
by
Microsoft for other companies to include within their own applications. It
uses the VB6 syntax and usually makes available a specialised object model
for controlling the host application, and has a simpler forms library than
VB6 (VBA UserForms are simpler and less capable than VB6 Forms).
General-purpose VB6 code can often be imported into VBA projects and work
unmodified.