I am about to delve into some VB programming for SW. Several years ago, I did some VBA for AutoCAD, so I am not new to this, but needed some refreshing on it.

I just purchased the book by Mike Spens; "Automating SolidWorks 2009 Using Macros".

He says in his introduction that you can save a recorded macro as a Visual Basic.net, Visual Basic 6, or C#.net.

I have a general idea of what .net is... it is intended to be a means of accessing and controlling information in the Windows platform. And in particular, it was designed to use the same format in multiple languages.

I understand that the product Microsoft calls Visual Basic has gone through some significant changes over the years. In particular, they've changed from the older ".com" that was in Visual Basic 6, to the ".net" format that is in the current version of Visual Basic.

Now, throw into the mix the topic of VBA. I am thinking of this as a subset of the full Visual Basic programming environment. But, I am unclear where this falls in regards to .com vs. .net. I know, at least, that older versions of VBA (say 5 years ago) were definitely the .com version. But, I have several questions;

-What is the current status of VBA in general? Has it switched to .net?
-What is the VBA in Excel? Has it also changed over the years from .com to .net?
-Does SolidWorks use VBA?

I just purchased VBA for Dummies 5th edition, published 2007. Will this help the situation, or make it worse?

Joe Dunfee