Office XP Primary Interop Assemblies

[J-T]

I'm trying to read an excell file in my .Net application using Office XP
Primary Interop Assemblies
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnoxpta/html/odc_oxppias.asp).
I have installed Office 2003 on my developemnt box.Will my application be
able to read all kinds of Excell file (97-2000-2003)?

Dose the wrapper that .Net framework generates backward copatiable?

Do I have to have the same version of Office in production too?

Thanks a lot
Bruce,

 

[Bob Grommes]

The PIAs are hand-tuned to improve upon the interop assemblies that can be
automatically generated by VS, so those wouldn't be entirely compatible.

I have seen more than one person state that the PIAs themselves are not
particularly interchangeable. Here's an example from
http://blogs.msdn.com/eric_carter/archive/category/4620.aspx:

***
In my previous post I wrote this--but then removed it:

"Note that the Office XP PIAs will work against either Office XP or Office
2003. This is because the PIAs are backed by the COM object models of
Office that are versioned in such a way that the OM of Office XP is a proper
subset of the OM of Office 2003. In other words, if you use the Office XP
PIAs, you get the benefit that your code will work against Office XP and
Office 2003, but you don't get to use any of the cool new developer features
of Office 2003 (like ListObject, XML Support, etc.)."

Although this should be true in theory, it turns out that in practice there
are some areas where the XP PIAs will blow up when you use them against
Office 2003. One example I've been told is that if you are an add-in and
you call Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Application.Open() using the XP PIAs
with Office 2003, you can crash Word.

So the current recommendation from Microsoft is not to use Office XP PIAs
with Office 2003.

Based on this it looks like you will have to intall all the PIAs and select
the correct one at runtime based on the Excel version you are dealing with.
I would Google around and see if anyone has some framework code to sort that
all out, before reinventing the wheel.

--Bob

 

[J-T]

Bob,

I so appreciate your help,
Please let me know as you know more about it.

 

[J-T]

Based on this it looks like you will have to intall all the PIAs andHow should I select the correct one? I need to know somehow which version of
Excell I am getting ? right?
The only thing I want to do with the Excel file is to check the format of
data inside to see if it has a header and footer ,That's it!!!
I think there should be an easier way to this stuff.I don;t need anything
fancy!! only to be able to open the Excell file and check the content.

Thanks again

 

[Bob Grommes]

Well if you're going to do something simple and you are targeting XP and
2003, I'd be inclined to write against the XP PIA and test thoroughly with
both versions of Excel and if it works and you think the code will remain
fairly stable (not constantly shifting / expanding requirements) then go for
it. You note that the blogger I quoted gave an example of code blowing up
only if it's running within an add-in. That's a fairly esoteric scenario,
and I imagine other problem areas may be equally off the beaten path.

I haven't encountered anyone who's written helper code for determining the
installed version of Excel, but I suspect it might be Google-able. Once you
determine how to do that and write or crib your GetExcelVersion() method,
you would use reflection to reference the appropriate PIA at runtime. I
have done neither, so can't give you specifics. But again -- if you're
really doing some trivial automation, then try it with the XP PIA and see if
it works. No sense complicating matters unless you are forced to.

--Bob