office interop

[John]

Hi

I need to call methods from office apps from my vb.net app. Some of my
clients are still on office 2000 so to maintain compatibility I can not use
office 2003 PIA. Can I avoid the whole PIA route by using late binding?
Could someone please give me an example of using late binding for calling
office apps?

Thanks

Regards

 

[scorpion53061]

John,

You will still need the library from Office 2000. Yes they are backward
compatible. That is not true in all cases however. It is a pain but I
maintain all office installations on my machine in order to accommodate
these situations and for testing purposes because I want to be using the
bottom most library I know will be used by the client otherwise you run
the risk or writing incompatible code.

 

[Arne Janning]

Hi John!

I need to call methods from office apps from my vb.net app. Some of my
clients are still on office 2000 so to maintain compatibility I can not
use office 2003 PIA. Can I avoid the whole PIA route by using late
binding? Could someone please give me an example of using late binding for
calling office apps?

Here is a small late-binding example:

How To Use Visual Basic .NET for Binding for Office Automation Servers
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304661/EN-US/

Cheers

Arne Janning

 

[dhyan]

I 've built a big project on .net excel interoperability .. but i'm
struck bcoz i've to use that application with differenrt version of
applications. Can u Suggest any idea how can i change my excel com
wrapper on the runtime .. or with any other way which i can deploy the
system with respective excel com .

I'm having problem which compliing also as excel 2000 takes some less
arguments than excel 2002 , open and save functions ..

 

[John]

Hi Dhyan

I have not yet tried this but I was told to use late binding. This way you
do not need the interop dlls and hence no tying down to any particular
version at design time. Secondly at runtime call the function with one set
of arguments. If there is an error, trap the error and call the function
with the alternate arguments. Not elegant but it may work. If it does let us
all know.

Regards

 

[Guest]

You can achieve multiple-version compatibility without resorting to late
binding.
It requires that you build an Interop assembly against the lowest version:
http://www.devcity.net/Articles/163/1/article.aspx

--scott

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