Thanks for Your kind comment

With refer to Rob’s focus on ‘why’ I believe that when the walkthrough is complete we may not necessarily raise the question ‘why’ as ‘how’ is both very complext and ‘clear as mud’…

But let me make the walktrough complete and then we can summarize it from a more general view.

Kind regards,
Dennis

I didnt know you had to put a PIA on the host mechine too! And we all know theres no offical PIA for 2000. A com addin is so easy in comparison!

Still onwards and upwards.

I notice that you can buy a copy of VS 2005 for 40 GBP on ebay (standard verson pro is ~90) VS6 is about 150!

not sure about this though:
“4. No intellectual property concerns as most .net code is pretty simple to reverse engineer” lol!!!

I’m off to part 2
Kep up the good work Dennis!

Thanks for Your input and it’s also good to know that You will take part of the .NET stuff I’ll make available in the upcoming post. After all, it’s new to most of us.

Kind regards,
Dennis

The case for .net:
if all of the following -
1. full control over the target desktops and a willingness to install and maintain multiple versions of the .net framework on each.
2. Existing .net code resources to expose through Excel
3. Existing .net skills in the team – C# essential, as much of the info is C# and not VB
4. No intellectual property concerns as most .net code is pretty simple to reverse engineer
5. Understanding of COM shims to get code signing and app domain isolation
6. Clear evidence that performance requirements can be met.
7. I’ll stop there for now
Then it may well be appropriate to combine .net and Excel.

I like .net and use it for server based stuff where appropriate, but I struggle to see the point of managed extensions for a completely unmanaged app like Excel. I also doubt very much that Excel will ever be re-written in managed code.

Like Rob I’d be very interested to hear from people who have deployed this stuff commercially. From what I have seen VBA devs are staying there and .net devs want to do web apps not Excel (its a massive object model to learn).

cheers
Simon

Good to see You around and the project You mention sounds interesting.

We don’t only deal with complexity but also oddities which I hope I can show in the coming post.

Kind regards,
Dennis

A very nice start indeed — but already we can see how complex .NET and Office can be!

Hey Rob,

I personally do not see any “need” to use VB.NET at this stage. I think the majority of those using .NET solutions at present will be .NET programmers coming “downstream,” if you will. Those with VBA and COM DLL skills will move upstream to .NET, eventually, but I think that the .NET-COM bridge that MSFT is building still has further to go. It’s a bummer, but Excel is such a complex COM application that I suspect that fully porting it to .NET will take a couple of versions more…

That said, I think that my next Excel project could be nearly 100% .NET. It is a rather large, complex solution that can greatly benefit by .NET’s Inheritance and Generics features. However, I will have to first test the deployment issues very, very carefully before proceeding.

So, it depends on what you are trying to make, I guess, and one’s skill set. And articles like this from Dennis should really help us VBA/VB6 guys to start to learn things from the .NET perspective. The future is coming (if slowly) and so it’s good to get some early exposure.

Kind regards,
Dennis