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Expert Texture

The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson

Quote of the day, 10/30/2007

October 30, 2007 at 12:22 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing, Miscellaneous

Today I was in a conference call doing a demonstration of the Digipede Network. 

One of the demos includes using Excel as a front-end to a distributed code-behind calculation.  A common follow on question was asked (heavily paraphrased),

what about code trapped in Excel workbooks?

The answer is, yes, we can (and have several customers that do) distribute Excel workbooks for distributed execution.  Our software moves the workbooks, launches Excel through COM, executes calcs in the workbook, saves them, and brings back the workbook. 

The prospect says,

That is both commendable and horrifying at the same time.

Heh. 

As is most of the work we’ve done to provide stable, registration-free COM contract for the Digipede COM users.

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COM APIs for .NET Libraries

September 7, 2005 at 7:07 am · Filed under .NET

Recently I added a COM API to the Digipede Framework API – developing a good, maintainable COM API was critical. The “easy” Microsoft .NET COM interop works pretty well, but it defaults too many things for those of us building public libraries.

If your public library needs to support COM, there are several steps you will want to take to make your COM API easier to maintain and to allow your library to behave (or appear) as COM clients expect.

I am thinking of writing an article (or a series of blog entries) on the steps I took designing our COM API. While some material exists out there on this (most of it pure reference), none of it brings it all together, soup to nuts.

My quick outline for the article:

  1. Introduction
  2. Limitations of COM interfaces
  3. Overriding the class interface
  4. Eventing interfaces
  5. Building your Type Library
  6. Embedding your Type Library
  7. Enabling Registration-Free COM
  8. Building a COM API Reference w/NDoc

Every section will include examples.

I guess my only question is: do I blog it or write an article for one of the many .NET related sites? If I write an article, which site should I submit it to?

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