Comments on: Old Tech Rules

By: Ernesto Moyes

Ernesto Moyes — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 03:19:54 +0000

Hello, I came across this blog article while looking for help with Microsoft Silverlight. I’ve recently changed browsers from Chrome to Firefox 3.2. Just recently I seem to have a issue with loading sites that use Microsoft Silverlight. Every time I go on a website that needs Microsoft Silverlight, my browser does not load and I get a “npctrl.dll” error. I cannot seem to find out how to fix it. Any aid getting Microsoft Silverlight to function is greatly appreciated! Thanks

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:20:02 +0000

Mr. A., you do know that you are a sort of VB demi-god. If it has to do with VB, if you can’t answer it, it probably doesn’t have an answer, or so it is said. So it’s nice to see that yet even you still get burned by Msoft from time to time. Misery loves company!

By: Michael Dudley

Michael Dudley — Thu, 07 May 2009 01:46:57 +0000

Wow,
What perfect timing to read this. I have been developing Excel adins in VBA for a couple of years now and have been able to pull off some really great applications. I have been planning on learning VB.net this summer, possibley start learning C# and to dive into VSTO. Maybe I should rethink this move.

I have been perferctly happy with VBA, I just have a nagging feeling that the technology bus is leaving me behind as everything moves to .net.

Should I still be pursuing .net as an office developer?

By: Mark D'Agosta

Mark D'Agosta — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:30:54 +0000

Dan,

Thanks for posting this. Visual Studio Tools for Office is a technology that I had great hopes for a few years back, but the public information was always very sketchy. It seemed they really didn’t have all the gears grinding in the same direction. As if they really didn’t want to sell the product.

I’ve done an extensive amount of Excel/VBA development over the past 5 years but, fortunately, had chucked the VSTO idea in the dustbin. I’m glad I did. Nothing more frustrating that getting hung up on (what should be) a procedural technicality. It’s good to finally hear a review from someone that I consider to be a reliable source.

BTW, I still consider your book “Developing ActiveX Components with Visual Basic” to be the gold standard of developer books. I never got so much value out of any other book I’ve ever purchased.

Regards,
Mark

By: Semper Augustus

Semper Augustus — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:46:06 +0000

I was somewhat disappointed to find that there are still parts of .Net that are just glorified wrappers around unmanaged code- System.DirectoryServices (maybe it was fixed in 3.5?) was just a wrapper around the already finicky ADSI, VSTO is just a wrapper around the old Office COM API, etc. It just seems like MS hasn’t really tried to fix what it did half-heartedly in the past, but instead has been moving in some really weird directions (use ADO.Net! wait, typed datasets are the answer! no, wait, LINQ to MS SQL Server is the answer! Or the ADO.Net Entity Framework! No, forget that, learn Azure!) (unless you use a database other than SQL Server, than forget all of that silliness…)

Maybe I’m just cynical, but it’s getting easier and easier to dismiss the “hot new thing” after seeing the chains of poorly thought out products. It’s hard to get excited over Silverlight after seeing Liquid Motion -> ActiveX Controls -> ActiveX Documents (remember those from Visual Studio 6?) -> Silverlight…

By: Gabriel

Gabriel — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:23:08 +0000

The worst part is supporting multiple versions of Excel… I had to do an add-in that required support of 2000 and 2003 and it was a nightmare to find which combination of the PIAs/VSTO would work on both versions.

I agree with you on this 100%…