AutoCAD 2010 VBA and VSTA future

This is a follow up to the previous post No VBA installed with AutoCAD 2010. Here’s some more information about the future of VBA and VSTA for AutoCAD based products.

http://www.autodesk.com/vba-download will in a few weeks time have a FAQ about the future of VBA and VSTA. If you have any questions you want to be answered or addressed please add a comment below and I will forward it to Autodesk for consideration.

This discussion group post has a reply from Eric Stover at Autodesk.

We will continue to support VBA now and into the foreseeable future in the AutoCAD product line. We are putting together a transition plan to .NET and VSTA and expect to support VBA until our research shows most customers have migrated their code (which could take years.)

We are offering VBA for download on our website - which will appear once the product officially ships. You can download the product and install and deploy it within your organization. Your VBA code should work just as before.

Information on the longer term transition to VSTA is coming soon. Autodesk is working on a .NET developers guide (no release date yet).

The COM interface will remain and work even without VBA installed. This is important to know if you program in AutoLISP and Visual LISP.

One cool thing with VSTA is that both Visual Basic and Visual C# can be used as well as having a more modern IDE that is similar to Visual Studio.

When you migrate VBA code to run for AutoCAD 2010 remember you might need to change the reference to point to to the AutoCAD 2010 type library acax18enu.tlb or the like. One error message you can get if you forget to do this is "Type Mismatch".

Code like this one below needs to use 18 as well.
Set Acad = GetObject(, "AutoCAD.Application.18")