Time to wrap this series on VSTO add-ins for Excel 2007. Now that we have a working application-level add-in, we want to deploy it on the user machine. There are two ways to do that: ClickOnce and Windows Installer. In this post, I will go over creating a basic installer using Windows installer with Visual Studio 2008. Very soon, we’ll have a VIP guest blogger who will tell you all you need to know about ClickOnce deployment and VSTO.

This post borrows heavily from the Microsoft white paper linked below, which is absolutely excellent. I mostly paraphrased it, focusing on the how and not the why. I strongly encourage you to go to the source and read it for more details:

Deploying a VSTO 3.0 Solution for Office 2007 System Using Windows Installer

The white paper comes with sample code, covering a few scenarios:

VSTO installer sample code 

Note: the following applies to Office 2007 projects. If your add-in needs to run on Excel 2003, you should follow this guidance instead: Deploying VSTO Solutions Using Windows Installer (Part 2 of 2)

Surgeon General Warning: prolonged reading of material pertaining to msi deployment can cause drowsiness or confusion; absolutely no risk whatsoever of euphoria is to be expected.

This post is not going to be sexy. My goal is to have a check-list of what to do to get your add-in to install correctly. The steps require no thinking, and are frankly rather boring. I find some steps pretty obscure, and recommend patience and soothing music; you may consider also having  some sacrificial offering ready to appease the Great Installer Voodoo deity (a nice chicken will usually do). 

Prepare the add-in

We will start from where we left off, with a working add-in (download the add-in here). Let’s first fill in the fields describing our assembly, by right-clicking on the project:

ClearLines.Anakin > Properties > Application > Assembly information:

Next, let’s set the configuration to Release, so that we feed the optimized release version to the installer. Right-click on the Solution (not the add-in project), select Configuration Manager, and set ClearLines.Anakin to Release instead of Debug.

More...

Found on Epic Win FTW – The Sparklines of Excel 2010 are cool, but this is an Epic Win indeed. Pretty amazing, and another shining example of how Excel is used for lots of purposes, some of them probably never considered by Microsoft :)

A client asked me recently a fun probability question, which revolved around figuring out the probability of success of a research program. In a simplified form, here is the problem: imagine that you have multiple labs, each developing products which have independent probabilities of succeeding – what is the probability of more than a certain number of products being eventually successful?

Let’s illustrate on a simple example. Product A has a 30% probability of success, and product B a 60% probability of success. Combining these into a probability tree, we work out that there is an 18% chance of having 2 products successful, 18% + 12 % + 42% = 72% chance of having 1 or more products succeed, and 28% chances of a total failure.

It’s not a very complicated theoretical problem. Practically, however, when the number of products increases, the number of outcomes becomes large, fairly fast – and working out every single combination by hand is extremely tedious.

Fortunately, using a simple trick, we can generate these combinations with minimal effort. The representation of integers in base 2 is a decomposition in powers of 2, resulting in a unique sequence of 0 and 1. In our simplified example, if we consider the numbers 0, 1, 2 and 3, their decomposition is

0 = 0 x 2^2 + 0 x 2^1 –> 00

1 = 0 x 2^2 + 1 ^ 2^1 –> 01

2 = 1 x 2^2 + 0 x 2^1 –> 10

3 = 1 x 2^2 + 1 x 2^2 –> 11

As a result, if if consider a 1 to encode the success of a product, and a 0 its failure, the binary representation of integers from 0 to 3 gives us all possible outcomes for our two-products scenario.

More...

In my last post I explored how ExcelDNA can be used to write high-performance UDFs for Excel, calling .Net code without the overhead of VSTO. Using .Net instead of VBA for intensive computations already yields a nice improvement. Still, I regretted that ExcelDNA supports .Net up to 3.5 only, which puts the Task Parallel Library off limits – and is too bad  because the TPL is just totally awesome to leverage the power of multi-cores.

As it turned out, this isn’t totally correct. Govert  Van Drimmelen (the man behind ExcelDNA) and Jon Skeet (the Chuck Norris of .Net) pointed that while the Task Parallel Library is a .Net 4.0 library, the Reactive Extensions for .Net 3.5 contains an unsupported 3.5 version of the TPL – which means that it should be possible to get parallelism to work with ExcelDNA.

This isn’t a pressing need of mine, so I thought I would leave that alone, and wait for the 4.0 version of ExcelDNA. Yeah right. Between my natural curiosity, Ross McLean’s comment (have fun at the Excel UK Dev Conference!), and the fact that I really want to know if I could get the Walkenbach test to run under 1 second, without too much of an effort, I had to check. And the good news is, yep, it works.

Last time we saw how to turn an average PC into a top-notch performer; let’s see how we can inject some parallelism to get a smoking hot calculation engine.

More...

Some time ago, I came across ExcelDNA, an open-source library designed to integrate .Net into Excel, via a  post by the Grumpy One, who described it as an interesting way to get Excel to talk to a compiled library. Sounds right down my alley, but I still managed to let 6 months pass until I finally tried it.

This reminded me of another post, by J-Walk this time, where he uses a random walk simulation in VBA to benchmark system performance. Back then, I ran the VBA code, and also the equivalent C# in a console app, out of curiosity: 11.38 seconds, vs. 2.73 seconds. Why not try the same experiment, and see if we can get the best of both worlds and bring some of the C# power into Excel via ExcelDNA?

So I created a Class Library, with the following method, a close equivalent to the VBA benchmark code:

public class Experiment
{
  public static string RandomWalk()
  {
     var stopwatch = new Stopwatch();
     stopwatch.Start();
     var position = 0;
     var random = new Random();
     for (var run = 0; run < 100000000; run++)
     {
        if (random.Next(0, 2) == 0)
        {
           position++;
        }
        else
        {
           position--;
        }
     }
     stopwatch.Stop();
     var elapsed = (double)stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds / 1000d;
     return "Position: " + position.ToString() + ", Time: " + elapsed.ToString();
  }
}

More...