Category Archives: CodeProject

Excel addins troubleshooting guide

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Introduction

So you have deployed your awesome Excel addin in production and all is working fine for some weeks : you are enjoying your success…
But one day the phone rings and the guy at the other side is not really happy; no, he is completely upset and you could almost smell his breath when he screams.
But why? Because your awesome addin has stopped working on his workstation without notice.

Sometimes the root-cause is obvious: you have delivered a new version, but in many cases you will hardly ever know the root-cause of this annoying situation: Windows update, Office update, quick and dirty moving/installation of the addin from a workstation to another one, bad alignment of Uranus and Jupiter…

A wealth of errors can happen, then it’s hard to have them all in mind, especially when you are in a hurry and with stress you start to get mixed up. So to be as efficient as possible you’d better have a checklist and this is precisely what this article will be, enumerating all the errors I have encountered describing usual causes and solutions.

So let’s troubleshoot!
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Essential tools for debugging and troubleshooting : Dependency Walker aka Depends

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Introduction

This is the first article of the “Essential tools for debugging and troubleshooting” series.
Visit the series main page for more information and to discover other tools.

Dependency Walker

Dependency walker (a.k.a Depends) is a simple yet powerful tool that you’ll find invaluable if you have to track the native dependencies of your components (EXE or DLL).
Dependency Walker can be used for static (without having to run any code) or dynamic analysis (with dependencies tracked while running your code).

I’ll illustrate its usefulness with a from scratch sample.
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Excel UDF library in C# from scratch

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Introduction

In this article I’ll show you how to create a UDF library for Excel in C# from scratch.
By “from scratch” I mean without using Visual Studio, only low-level tools : a simple text-editor like Notepad and the C# compiler.
This is of course not the way you’ll do it usually but it will hopefully help you to better understand how things work under the hood.

The pretext for this sample is a set of functions that provides financial data like the last bid and ask prices for a stock.
It uses the Yahoo finance REST API which is rich and simple and that you could use as a base for developing more advanced tools.
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