Topic: reference or late bind excel

[David Hall]

OK I have never done this in C#, so my question, Is it better to late bind excel for use in Autocad or to reference it in the project?  And on top of that, do I reference a DLL or the com thingy.  What I want to do is open excel for write, read my titleblock attributes, and write those values to excel.  My big stumbling block is how to connect to excel.

[David Hall]

I tried looking through the examples here on the swamp, but the most I could find was a USING statement, but I didn't know how the connection was made.

Code: [Select]

// borrowed from fixo
using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;
using Excel = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;

//' References -> COM -> Microsoft.Excel XX.0 Object Library
//' Create form and drop Button1 and ListView1 on it


[Kerry]

Hello David,

I recall that Kean has done a few posts regarding the use of Excel
... perhaps a search on his site will reveal a nugget.

haven't tried myself so can't post a sample and I'm up to my ears at the moment ...

[added]
Perhaps ?
http://through-the-interface.typepad.com/through_the_interface/excel/

[David Hall]

thanks Kerry, i will check that out now!

[gile]

Hi,

I tried something to read/write excel from AutoCAD (here).
I used late binding to solve compatibility issues: from the tests I did, a dll compiled against an Excel version won't work with earlier versions.

[Kerry]

Hi,

I tried something to read/write excel from AutoCAD (here).
I used late binding to solve compatibility issues: from the tests I did, a dll compiled against an Excel version won't work with earlier versions.

I KNEW I'd seen some code here somewhere ..

[Glenn R]

Read all about it - get yer early/late binding here.

[David Hall]

Thanks everyone, lots of reading to do now.

[Jerry J]

I really don't see any advantage to late binding, in that if you have the typelib for the earliest version you wish to support you would obviously use early binding for the intellisence and compile time error reporting.  If you don't have the typelib then how would you know if the method even existed, except for the runtime error, and then it's too late. I guess the late binding would be handy if you know the methods for each version and then ...switch case v1; v2; etc.  Is this really what Microsoft is saying?

Jerry