Hi,

I have an application written in Excel VBA that performs a specific banking function. The manual performance of this function takes between two and four hours a day. If I market this product can I charge the same price as an application written in Visual Basic.net?
I know that this is a strange question but I greatly appreciate feedback!

you might- but it's easy to "copy" an xls from one machine to another without so much as a registry "hack". I wouldn't expect to sell many. Price depends on how much time you save and how hard it would be for someone else to do the same thing without your VBA.

Hal Levy
Web Developer, PDI Inc.

NOT a Wiley/Wrox Employee

I would be most curious to see what kind of performance difference there is between the VBA version and a version written in .NET. Is the 2-4 hours usage time or actual time it takes for the thing to run/process? It sounds pretty complex. I would certainly pay more for something that performs better. Plus, IMO, selling something written in VBA is kind of cheesy. Plus, that creates the requirement that the consumer must have something that runs VBA. Most likely they will, but the .NET framework is free to download and install and you can easily distribute it with the application.

Peter
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Work smarter, not harder.

I would imagine that if 2-4 hours is the processing time, it would probably run a lot faster as a compiled .exe - I remember when VB.Net was first out, I heard numbers being touted that it ran up to 32 times faster than VB6 - though I've never tested this and would imagine it is very dependent on what you are doing.

Thanks for the posts guys.
The 2-4 hour time refers to the manual processing time it takes a bank employee to do the job by hand, which is currently the case.
The program (over 4,000 lines of code) does it in a second.
VB.net would appear to be the best way to go it seems but I have yet to tackle it.