Microsoft: Put Away Your VBA: Says VS.NET better for extending Office 2003

SD Times: Microsoft: Put Away Your VBA: Says VS.NET better for extending Office 2003 " Why replace VBA? “Because you get the full power of Visual Studio .NET, the benefits of writing with the .NET Framework, and you can use all the classes for data, calling Web services and file manipulation,” claimed Robert Green, lead product manager for Visual Studio .NET.
Green cited drawbacks with VBA, including macros and other executable code that resided within a Word document or Excel spreadsheet. In the new paradigm, code is stored in a .NET assembly and linked into the document. “You could store that code on the network, and when the user opens the document the code automatically gets downloaded to their machine,” which simplifies deployment and maintenance, he said.
Separating the code from the content can help eliminate security risks, claimed Joe Andreshak, lead product manager for Office. “With VBA, someone outside the company could e-mail me a document and execute code right on my workstation. The only protection the company has is my decision whether or not to run that code. With a Visual Studio Tools interface, if I am outside the company and e-mail the document, it points to code on a server outside the company,” which will run code only when requested from a trusted server."

This makes sense for a lot of reasons, but it's going to be a major transition for developers who have specialized in Access and VBA in other Office apps.