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Hey,
It Thursday. This is a wonderful thing, since I will be taking off tomorrow. Jill, Steve, and I are hoping to head down for the New York City Changeling game - unfortunately we may not have a place to crash after it and thus the trip may not happen. I'm hoping it works out: I'd like to get down there and play my new Liam.
Other than that, this week has been hectic. At work, I've been trying to fix a tool I broke several months back and then dropped. Supposedly, we weren't going to need this tool again - we were going to build a better way to handle translations. I should have anticipated being asked to use the tool again, really. Ah well, a few days work and its successfully exporting and importing word documents once more. I would like, at this point, to thank Microsoft for the absolutely uselessness of their PIAs for Office. They work, but are really just imports of the COM-exposed object models. This works fine, except that in COM, you can ignore all the optional parameters. Guess what you can't really do in .NET? This is very bad - one reason you can ignore optional parameters in COM is because it helps support backwards compatability. Not having that option in .NET means you're coding against a specific version of Office. God help you if your users are running an older or newer version.
The answer, in the end, has been to use dynamically bound objects pointing to COM types. This is very possible - its also very verbose and also strips away some of the advantages of .NET (strong types coming straight to mind). It does, though, work. So I guess there we go.
I would still kill, though, for a .NET native, powerful and intuitive interface to Office. I'd kill multiple people for one that could reliably create an Office document in a server environment. Well.. not really - but I'd be ever so happy.
At home, things have been less hectic. Jilliko is doing dress rehearsals for the Penfield Melodrama. Lots, and lots, and lots of drama there involving all sorts of hot button issues for community theatre. Ask sometime, and she might share the story.
Anyways. Not much to write about this week. Maybe more next week.
It Thursday. This is a wonderful thing, since I will be taking off tomorrow. Jill, Steve, and I are hoping to head down for the New York City Changeling game - unfortunately we may not have a place to crash after it and thus the trip may not happen. I'm hoping it works out: I'd like to get down there and play my new Liam.
Other than that, this week has been hectic. At work, I've been trying to fix a tool I broke several months back and then dropped. Supposedly, we weren't going to need this tool again - we were going to build a better way to handle translations. I should have anticipated being asked to use the tool again, really. Ah well, a few days work and its successfully exporting and importing word documents once more. I would like, at this point, to thank Microsoft for the absolutely uselessness of their PIAs for Office. They work, but are really just imports of the COM-exposed object models. This works fine, except that in COM, you can ignore all the optional parameters. Guess what you can't really do in .NET? This is very bad - one reason you can ignore optional parameters in COM is because it helps support backwards compatability. Not having that option in .NET means you're coding against a specific version of Office. God help you if your users are running an older or newer version.
The answer, in the end, has been to use dynamically bound objects pointing to COM types. This is very possible - its also very verbose and also strips away some of the advantages of .NET (strong types coming straight to mind). It does, though, work. So I guess there we go.
I would still kill, though, for a .NET native, powerful and intuitive interface to Office. I'd kill multiple people for one that could reliably create an Office document in a server environment. Well.. not really - but I'd be ever so happy.
At home, things have been less hectic. Jilliko is doing dress rehearsals for the Penfield Melodrama. Lots, and lots, and lots of drama there involving all sorts of hot button issues for community theatre. Ask sometime, and she might share the story.
Anyways. Not much to write about this week. Maybe more next week.
