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Pain Points of Programmability

Say that 3 times real fast.  No wait, don't.

I'm interested in your top pain point for writing code against the Office suite of applications.  Why?  Because I'm doing some research to understand more of the issues that you face as developers. 

Now I know that I may not really realize what I'm asking for or getting myself into.  I can't commit to fixing all of them or even responding to the comments for this post.  I'm just trying to enumerate.

One of the main pain points I already know about are optional arguments in C#, so there's no real need to post that one. 

Others?

thanks,
Patrick

Published Friday, June 30, 2006 9:52 AM by patricksmith

Comments

# re: Pain Points of Programmability

When coding against Excel, the following spring to mind:
- The continual disconnect between editing Excel sheets within the .Net window vs native Excel (i.e. menus in different places)
- The need to memorise at least 5 different variants of the Excel object model:
   - When called from VBA
   - When called from VB.NET via PIA
   - When called from C# via PIA
   - When called from VB.NET with VSTO runtime
   - When called from C# with VSTO runtime
  Why couldn't the VSTO objects have been included in the core applications?
- The fact that there's no OnKey facility in VSTO.
- The spin cycle (start Excel - get to correct point in application - test - find bug - shut down Excel - fix bug - repeat) you have to through whenever a non-trivial bug is found (but it's better with E&C than it was).
- The fact that we can't write managed function libraries, with descriptions, help text etc (we can only do Automation Addins)
- The distribution and security model effectively preventing sharing solutions outside the corporate network.

Needless to say, I still use VBA for production applications. VSTO is still in the research lab.
Monday, July 03, 2006 5:04 PM by Stephen Bullen

# re: Pain Points of Programmability

Hi Patrick,
Our pain is that VSTO doesn't work across all versions of Office.

We are a .Net shop BTW and our clients do not deploy the bigger office suites - their staff only need the functionality of the smaller suites.

Worse it's really hard to tell (for the casual observer - ie our customers) which versions support VSTO and which don't.

Best regards
Steve
Tuesday, July 04, 2006 8:35 AM by Steve Hurcombe

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