Rapid Application Development / Advanced Excel Development

Visual Studio Install

Xll Series Contents

(note this is a work in progress - more pages will be added and linked too as and when we have time to complete them to an acceptable level)

• Series intro
• Brief introduction to xlls - what, why, etc.
• The Codematic xll base project
• Installing Visual Studio C++ 2008 Express. (this page)
• Installing the Excel Xll SDK for use with Visual Studio 2008 (C++ Express)
• Very brief overview of C and C++ editors (VS2008)
• Creating a simple dll
• Debugging xlls
• Introduction to XLM.
• Using CALL to access external dll functions from XLM
• Registering dll functions for use from a worksheet cell - using XLM and VBA
• The XLOPER data type and xlcall.h
• The Excel4() function and xlcall.h
• Converting a dll to xll by adding in the registration information
• The Microsoft xll Software Development Kit and framework.
• The Codematic custom xll development service

Installing Visual Studio 2008 (C++ Express) (This page)

Microsoft have made xll development very accessible by making their excellent Visual Studio Express development tools available for free.

Xlls must be in native win32 format. They cannot (easily) be written in C#, VB.net or most other languages/development tools. Delphi can create files in the correct format, but VB6 can't, nor can most .net tools.

This means that Visual C++ Express is the required product for xll development. The 2008 version include the ability to create native win32 dlls. Previous versions didn't - for those you would need to download the Win 32 SDK separately.

Download Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition and run the setup. This won't be a quick job, but shouldn't need much interaction. Make sure you have plenty of disc space for the temporary installation files.

Once it has extracted all the files it will begin the install process.

After the install comes the configuration.

Finally several cups of tea later you are greeted with the VC welcome screen.

The next steps for xll development are to install the Excel xll SDK - this is available from the Microsoft MSDN site. Use your favourite search engine to find it (MSDN address are not very stable so we have not included a link here).

Instructions for installing the SDK and setting Visual studio up to work with it are here.

If you require any more information please get in touch.