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Introducing: The SharePoint and VBA Code Analyzer

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Learn about a tool that analyzes your SharePoint full-trust code solutions and Office add-ins and macros to help you redesign them for the app model. Security is important to us—your code remains private while using the tool.

The app model is a great tool that fully embraces the benefits of moving to the cloud, but migrating to the model can be a time-consuming task. SharePoint is a complex enterprise-level collaboration system, and custom solutions built on top of the SharePoint platform using full trust code don’t easily map to a cloud-based deployment. Similarly, Office client solutions – managed add-ins and VBA macros built on individual client object models - are widely deployed on desktops and need to be ported to work in the cloud. We understand that creating these solutions required a significant investment. We want to help you translate these solutions to cloud-friendly apps as painlessly as possible.

To help you along, we’re excited to announce the SharePoint and VBA Code Analyzer—a tool to help you understand how you can refactor your SharePoint and Office client solutions to Office 365. Working with Mobilize.net, one of our long-standing partners, we’ve created a web portal where you can upload your SharePoint and Office client solutions and get a complete analysis of the existing code. We’ll provide guidance and recommendations on what level of effort needs to be invested to move them to the cloud, so you can start refactoring your custom business solutions as soon as possible.

“But, wait!” you think. “I can’t send my company’s code where external parties look at it!” No worries—we have put several security measures in place to prevent unauthorized access, and the code runs through a completely black-box process. The analysis is done with automated tools which only collect metadata about files, lines of code, ASP.NET application pages, web parts, libraries, workflows, and other platform-dependent objects. We then use this data to generate reports on how you can map your existing code to the new model. The tool is also hosted behind a digital certificate-enabled site, which ensures that everything that goes across the wire to our black box process is encrypted.

Knowing is half the battle, but understanding the migration process is only the first step. In the near future, we will reviewing your feedback and improving this tool to enable more solution types, as well as mapping various solution components to well-known refactoring methods to cloud-friendly components. In the meantime, let us know what you think. We'll follow up with updates based on your feedback.

This post is brought to you by the Office Developer Platform team.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2014
    Cool!  But the lead-in states that this is a "tool that analyzes your SharePoint full-trust code solutions and Office add-ins and macros".  The importer appears to only accept Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. If VSTO projects are not supported, then the tool doesn't truly work with Office Application or Document level add-ins. Some clarification would be welcome!

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2014
    As you mention, the tool accepts Word, Excel, Power Point and the Sharepoint file *.WSP for analysis.  VSTO is not part of the first version. Thank you for the feedback.

  • Anonymous
    September 08, 2014
    Are there plans to make this service available for MS Access VBA?

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2015
    when you click on the link, IE gives a warning that the site has an issue with its certificate.   Do you know why this is happening?