In my last post I explained reasons and gotchas to be concerned with when deciding to migrate from an Excel *.xla add-in to a C# add in.  One of the reasons revolved around not having an easy way to use a source control product (we use Visual SourceSafe) to manage the actual code files of a VBAProject.  This is because the *.xla is a binary file and using SourceSafe (and I would assume other products) you can not compare differences of a binary file (not to mention the VBAProject files that are part of the binary blob).

I mentioned that I automated getting the code files out of the VBAProject and into SourceSafe.  I am sure there third party add-ins that allow a source control product to integrate into Excel, but the code is fairly simple to automate it yourself.... [More]

At my day job, we use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets as a pseudo "specification document" (spec sheet) for the websites, which are actuarial in nature, we create.  At the time (several years back), since we chose Excel, obviously we needed an add-in for the few automated processes we supported and we needed something immediately (you know how it goes in small companies).  The easiest way for us to create the add-in we needed was to create an Excel add-in file (*.xla).  My background (5-6 years ago) was from VB6 anyway, so even though I'd switched to C#, VB6 was still fresh in my mind and writing VBA was a breeze - whether the code was clean or not, I've got not comment ;).  I've recently made the decision to migrate an existing Microsoft Excel Add-In (*.xla) file to managed C# code.  There were several motivating factors to this decision along with almost as many speed bumps... [More]

Well my excuses for not blogging have gone out the window.  For those of you reading this that have visited our site before, you will realize a drastic change in the site.  I always wanted my site to be more of a blogging / online journal type site and I'm happy to announce that it is going to start now.  I converted from my own 'home grown' site (where I wrote all the code) to blogengine.net which as you can guess by its name has all of its focus revolving around blogging.  This should really allow me (and Ann) to stay more current on my blogging by eliminating the pains my old site had in terms of 'publishing/creating' posts.  We can now use other blog editing tools and we will both be using Windows Live Writer (WLW).  When that was release a long time back I wanted to code up my old site to allow WLW to 'communicate' with it, but alas, I never got it done.  In addition to making it easier on myself to create content, it has a much richer 'navigation/search' capability for viewing all our blogs which makes things easier on you as well!

So what's this 'added purpose' you might ask?  I plan to do both personal and professional blogs.  I thought about creating a separate blog for the professional posts, but it's not like I'm trying to reach a million page hits or anything, just more wanting to practice my writing skills more so I'm just cramming everything on my site (hey other programmers have families too!).  Plus documenting some of the 'coding adventures' I have had might help some other 'poor lost soul' (read: someone like me) desperately looking for answers to some obscenely obscure issue at 4am after a 6 hours of fruitlessly Google-ing the wrong words.  But hey, lets be honest.  If I start posting technical articles, they'll serve as a substitute for the lacking documentation in my code ;)

Back to the personal side of my blog.  The problem is, up until now, most of my site visitors have all been family and friends looking for 'family' stuff - i.e. photos and videos.  blogengine.net did not really have any 'media' capabilities built in.  I've temporarily hooked up the Silverlight Slide.Show as a photo viewer.  It works okay, but I plan on changing it.  The 'issues' I have with Slide.Show is that it does not support photo comments, photo ratings or perma-links (at least not natively).  As for our video gallery, that has been downgraded even more (whoops).  There's no flashy interface for browsing or viewing videos.  I'm currently just 'dumping' out a listing of the videos - no albums, no comments, no ratings, and no perma-links.  In all my free time (sarcasm) I plan on coding up a pretty cool interface for my media as a means to learn more about Silverlight (yes, media viewing on my site will eventually require Silverlight 2.0).  I plan on taking some ideas from at least a couple places:

• Microsoft Techdays Paris 2008 - Cool Microsoft Surface type interface for watching movies.  Also has ability to see 'notes' on a video.  I'd incorporate a similar type of idea for allowing people to add comments/ratings to videos.
• Silverlight Surface - Again, another Microsoft Surface type interface for browsing images.  Probably the first iteration I'll have for viewing photos / videos, but again, I think it'll be fun to play with for the viewers - along with seeing great photos ;)

So in the meantime, you should be seeing a higher frequency in posts from myself and Ann and all you media whores will just have to 'put up' with the current 'interfaces' until I find time to code up something cool.