Microsoft pretties Office for business apps

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Good article, thanks for the link.

I can't speak for others but I can talk about our companies experience. We use a LOT of Office add ins for shop floor data collection and tying it into Office (and back office).

These were written in Visual Basic (5 and 6) after first writing them in VBA and discovering the GAPING hole in security. (takes less than 30 seconds to hack a VBA add in and dump the code out.) Anyhow, we wrote them as a COM.

With Office 2007 right a round the corner as well as Vista we have been looking at what it will take to port the add ins over and it's not pretty. Visual Studio won't do a conversion (or does it so badly you could never straighten it out). We are faced with two choices, we can build our own PIA (Program Interop Assembly) and use the existing COM (slowly) or we can re-write it from scratch. Oh joy!!! Uncounted man hours to get back even with the board. (Ok, if we re-write it we will make some changes but they are not going to sell product and that means it's useless to our company.)

To add to it we have to contend with the new graphics sub-system. Not that I am against improving the graphics but the real problem is that this graphics engine exists only in Vista. (There are promises of a service pack for XP but not older versions and at least half my clients are on Win2K.)

This of course means we must maintain two complete code libraries and make certain the end user uses the right one. Yes I agree that Vista will be a dominant OS at some point down the line, but for a developer it's some distance away and we have to write code today.

I could also point out how easy it is to hack anything written with Visual Studio. Yes there are Obfuscation tools out there but they don't really work all that well and there are already hacks for them. This was not a problem with a VB project compiled to an exe.

All in all, I am being forced to make some very tough decisions in the next year I never thought I would have to make...

Posted by: No_Ax_to_Grind   Posted on: 06/12/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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