Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft® Visual C#™ .NET in 24 Hours

Hour 20. Controlling Other Applications Using Automation

In Hour 16, “Designing Objects Using Classes,” you learned how to use classes to create objects. In that hour, I mentioned that objects could be exposed to outside applications. Excel, for example, exposes most of its functionality as a set of objects. The process of using objects from another application is called Automation. The externally accessible objects of an application compose its object model. Using Automation to manipulate a program's object model enables you to reuse components. For instance, you can use Automation with Excel to perform complex mathematical functions using the code that's been written and tested within Excel, rather than writing and debugging the complex code ...