Working with VBA on Eclipse IDE

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Any cheap or free IDE’s out there for VB6 programming?

We plan to write complex VB6 projects. Now, when the legit MS Visual Studio 6 is scarce, in our organization we need to look for alternative environments. The paradigm of VBA, i.e. having all code embedded into a single xlsx/docx file is insuficient for our purposes. We also need some sort of bug tracking.

I know that Eclipse and VBA are just two separate worlds... but still, does some sort of integration exist? I'm looking in particular for:

• Development done in manageable .bas and .cls text files, not one big binary container.
• Some sort of debugging capabilities. I don't expect something to match VB6, but at least some form of automatic import & export of the code into some VBA-capable container (like .xlsx, docx)
• VBA Syntax highlighting
• Some sort of Intelli-Sense (code completion)
• Integration with EGit and Mylyn

I know, that I can glue something up with tools like custom macro, Notepad++, TortoiseGit etc. But the Eclipse already has a lot of functionality in place, and we use it in our organization anyway, so people wouldn't need to learn a lot of new stuff.

Solution

Short answer is No, it doesn't. The reason is that the VB6 compiler is part of VB6 another IDE would need a VB6 licence to use it (and if you have that then you have the VB6 IDE) or another compiler. Also if Eclipse supported VB6 then I'd expect a quick web search to reveal that.

If your main concern is availability of an IDE with VB code features then porting your VB to VB.Net is going to be your best option in the long term.