Nov 4, 2012 · 0 Comments
My current side project involves creating an Excel Add-in for Excel 2007 and 2010. Here are some useful tips and “gotchas” that I came across/experienced:
- Incredibly helpful: Searching the web for Excel help can be a painful experience - follow the VSTO team’s advice! Enable the Developer ribbon, start recording a macro, complete an action, then view the resulting VBA code. It will get you most of the way!
- Use .NET 4.0 for the Excel Add-in. An immediate benefit is not having to include a bunch of Type.Missing arguments - this is automatically handled for you.
- When debugging, always close the Excel application instead of choosing “Stop Debugging” from Visual Studio.
- As a result of many debugging sessions with Excel, it can decide to “hard disable” your Addin, which causes it not to load when debugging (with no error messages!). Here’s how to fix it.
- Unit testing an Excel Add-in is very limited, so decouple your logic into separate class libraries wherever possible.
- Use a for loop to iterate through collections of Excel objects (Ranges, Cells, Worksheets, etc.) instead of a foreach loop. Otherwise, the order of the elements can be incorrect or even skipped!
- Across the Web (looking at you, MSDN!), Microsoft Office applications are often referred to by their version numbers instead of year numbers. Excel 2007 is “Excel 12.0”, Excel 2010 is “Excel 14.0”, and Excel 2013 is “Excel 15.0”.
- To switch from debugging in Excel 2010 to 2007, see here.
- If you do not use Excel 2010-specific features, your plugin will just work with Excel 2007.
Aug 15, 2012 · 0 Comments
I am currently at “That Conference”, a brand new 3 day software development conference located in the Wisconsin Dells. Last night, I participated in a 4 hour hackathon - my first ever! Categories included “Best Use of Twilio”, “Best Use of Windows Azure”, and “Best Summer Camp theme”. My app won first place for “Best use of Windows Azure”!
It’s easy to forget things if you don’t write them down, so I use Evernote for organizing my thoughts, daily todo’s and projects. What if you have a thought/idea/note that you want to remember, but for some reason WIFI is not available? What if you don’t have a smart phone? My app allows you to send a text message to a special number, which then creates a new note in Evernote with the text message body.
Notable Details:
- Built on multiple services: a Windows Azure-hosted ASP.NET MVC3 web application, Twilio (for text message/SMS capabilities), and the Evernote Web API (to create a new Evernote note)
- 4 hour sprint (7pm to 11pm, but judging/presentations took us to 12:30am!)
- Famous (in tech) Microsoft community manager Scott Hanselman as a Guest Judge
- Prize: free beer tickets for Happy Hour (ha!) and a Sphero device
Technical Implementation:
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Jun 12, 2012 · 0 Comments
I am pleased to announce that my team has won 1st place in the Q2 2012 SAVO Innovation Challenge!
Last week, my team presented our app to SAVO’s Senior Leadership Team, which includes the heads of all departments as well as the CEO. After a bit of a rocky start (my laptop could not connect to the Internet), the SLT was greatly impressed with our application. We were the only team with a cross-departmental team (two of us from Consulting and one from Sales) and combined our software development skills with sales/business knowledge to create a simple, elegant solution. The SLT will be supporting us as we work towards creating a Consulting offering for our clients.
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