I just completed my first real-life VSTO project, and I am officially a convert: I can do everything I did in VBA, using mature languages like C#, and the comfort of the Visual Studio development tools.

Everything has not been smooth, though. I struggled quite a bit initially with deployment, a problem which just does not exist with VBA. However, after some digging, I came across this great post, which provides comprehensive step-by-step guidelines on setting up an add-in project for Office 2003.

At that point, I thought my issues were over, and I just cruised along, happily coding in C#. And then I decided that I would extract the logic of my calculation engine in a separate dll, which I would reference in my Excel add-in as a “satellite assembly” – and had a bad surprise. On my development machine, everything worked beautifully, and when I ran the installer on a clean machine, it installed my add-in without any complaint (The satellite dll was even added to the add-in folder), but somehow, the add-in did not run. No error message, no indication of a problem, but where I expected my dll to perform calculations, nothing happened.

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Just plugging the next Bay.Net Education Day (which I am organizing), where Mark Michaelis will

start with a blank slate, the Visual Studio Wizard, and proceed to create a series of assemblies that comprise .NET 3.0/.NET 3.5 sample application.  The result will be a whirl wind introduction to technologies such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Ajax, SharePoint, Visual Studio Unit Testing, LINQ and much more.  Attend this all day session to catch up with where Microsoft .NET technology is today and gain insight into where it is going tomorrow.

Should be a great event - it will take place Saturday September 6, at Foothill College; you can register here.