Have spent a couple of days looking at the various ways to integrate C# with Excel and have found in the process a number of good references on the web providing ways to achieve this, I have included those at the bottom of this post
My basic requirement at the moment is the following, I have a client that has many Excel Spreadsheets to support their business and they are looking to leverage the functionality in other applications, without having to re-write the current spreadsheets, so I need to provide a way to allow other applications to have access to this functionality, without modifying the original spreadsheets.
There are a number of ways I can do this,
1. Use a thirdparty tools that hides you from the details of integrating with Excel, KDCalc
2. Write the code yourself, this is not ideal, especially if there is a tool to do it for you, but usefull as an excercise when wanting to understand the details of the problem, so my next post will discuss how I went about it and the issues associated with it
References
ManagedXll, http://managedxll.net/index.html
KDCalc, http://www.knowledgedynamics.com/kdCalcProductPage.htm?ref=AdWords
MSDN, http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/odc_vsto2003_ta/html/ExcelObj.asp