0) and VSTO SE from
within Visual Studio 2005. Although Microsoft is supporting VB 6 applications for the fiveyear
product life cycle of Windows Vista, it is retiring support for the classic VB development
environment. The good news is that .NET technologies, while not directly supported
in Microsoft Office applications, are available to us via the VSTO SE package. Where previous
versions of VSTO gave us direct access to Office products from within the Visual Studio
development environment, the SE version does not. All access to Office applications is now
done via add-in applications created in VSTO SE.
In this chapter, we looked at a method of bringing data into an Excel workbook using an
ActiveX component created in VB 6.0. The code is almost identical to the code we wrote in
Chapter 2 when we looked at data access in Excel 2007. With very few lines of code in the Excel
VBE, we were able to accomplish what filled up multiple code modules in the original examples,
by wrapping that code in a COM object.
We then built a couple of components using .NET technologies. These components made
code nonexistent in our Excel workbooks. By running the code from an add-in, all we have to
do is load the add-in, and the code runs.We built a simple data access tool that loads Northwind
Employee data when a workbook is opened, and we designed a custom task pane that
calls a data entry form to collect data and place it on the active worksheet.
CHAPTER 9 n ACTIVEX AND .NET 350
nNumbers and Symbols
? character, using in Immediate window, 255
! (bang) character
adding to custom objects, 321
!Northwind2Excel Object, 321??“322
nA
Access 2000, new Northwind version in, 44
Access data, importing DAO using Jet,
55??“59
Access data import code vs.
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