August 2004
Intermediate to advanced
312 pages
8h 30m
English
Content preview from Excel 2003 Programming: A Developer's NotebookBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 5. Program Excel with .NET
Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET) is Microsoft’s next generation of the Basic language. The name change marks another milestone in the evolution of Basic: BASICA, QuickBasic, Visual Basic (VBA), and VB.NET each mark distinct changes in underlying technology. This latest change marks the graduation from the Windows Common Object Model (COM) in VBA to the .NET Framework in VB.NET.
The .NET Framework solves a lot of the shortcomings in COM—it has a more complete security model; provides a well-organized library of objects for working with HTTP, XML, SOAP, encryption, and other things; is fundamentally object-oriented; protects against memory leaks and corruption; promotes self-describing code—gosh, I’m starting to sound like a commercial—in short, .NET is the future for programming Windows.
Now the bad news: Excel is (and probably always will be) a COM application. This means that you have to take special steps if you want to use .NET components from Excel or if you want to program Excel from VB.NET.
But back to the good news: Microsoft provides many tools for making the transition between COM and .NET as easy as possible. In this chapter you will learn how to use those tools both to take advantage of .NET from Excel and vice versa.
Work with .NET
There are three main approaches to using .NET with Excel. You can use .NET to create:
Components that can be used from Excel macros. This approach works with all Excel versions and is much the same as ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.