I am very honored that the East Bay chapter of the Bay Area .Net user group will have me as a speaker this upcoming Wednesday. I’ll be talking “For Those About to Mock”, about Mocks and Stubs in .Net, after a presentation of the unit testing features of Visual Studio by Deborah Kurata – an apt opening topic, if you ask me.

You can find more information about this event here; Hope to see you on Wednesday!

Previous episodes

1. Getting Started
2. Using the Custom Task Pane
3. Using the Ribbon
4. Adding a WPF control
5. Displaying open workbooks & worksheets in a TreeView
6. Using Excel events to update the TreeView

Today is the day, we will finally close “chapter one” of these series, with some minor improvements of the tree view display of open workbooks and worksheets. The final result of our work looks like this, with a TreeView displaying all open workbooks and worksheets, refreshing its contents (quasi) automatically, and with some home-made icons just for kicks.

Rather than a systematic walk-through, I will just explain the changes I implemented to the code base, which I have now posted on a dedicated Wiki page.

Download Anakin project code

More...

Previous episodes

1. Getting Started
2. Using the Custom Task Pane
3. Using the Ribbon
4. Adding a WPF control
5. Displaying open workbooks & worksheets in a TreeView

It’s time to wrap-up the first part of this tutorial, and hook up our tree view to Excel events, to update the contents of the tree when the user changes what is open.

We need to capture the following: we need to update the TreeView when the user

• Opens, creates or closes a workbook
• Adds or deletes a worksheet

Added Worksheets and Workbooks

Let’s start with adding a worksheet to a workbook. Excel exposes that event, through the Workbook.NewSheet event. We want the WorkbookViewModel to take care of his children, so we modify the constructor the following way:

internal WorkbookViewModel(Excel.Workbook workbook)
{
   this.workbook = workbook;
   workbook.NewSheet += new Excel.WorkbookEvents_NewSheetEventHandler(workbook_NewSheet);
   // no change here, code stays the same
}

void workbook_NewSheet(object newSheet)
{
   var worksheet = newSheet as Excel.Worksheet;
   if (worksheet != null)
   {
      var worksheetViewModel = new WorksheetViewModel(worksheet);
      this.worksheetViewModels.Add(worksheetViewModel);
   }
}

Creating event handlers can be a bit tedious; fortunately, Visual Studio simplifies the task quite a bit. When you type workbook.NewSheet +=, you should see a tooltip appear, which “suggests” an event handler. Type Tab, and Tab again – Visual Studio will create for you the empty event handler, with the right arguments and types, where you can now insert the logic of what should happen when the event is triggered.

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I have grown a bit frustrated by the difficulty to gather information about local .Net development community events. Of all people, I am one of the best-positioned to hear about these events, because of my involvement with the San Francisco .Net user group, and yet, I routinely discover that I missed an event, because there is no clear place to go to get that information and I never heard about it.

So here we go – ladies and gentlemen, introducing NorCalWeekly.Net, your weekly serving of .Net events in north California! My goal will be to provide in one place, on a weekly basis, announcements for all upcoming .Net events in the area – so if you know of anything relevant taking place, please let me know! The design and features are somewhat minimalist for the moment, I’ll improve it over time.

.Net events in the North California area, Feb 18, 2010 – Feb 24, 2010.

Tuesday, Jan 19, 2010

7:00 PM, O'Reilly Media, Sebastopol: Mathias Brandewinder (that’s me) will talk “For Those about to Mock”. Free, organized by the North Bay .Net user group.

•  Event information

Wednesday, Jan 20, 2010

6:30 PM, Microsoft San Francisco Office, San Francisco: Peter Kellner will talk about “Using WCF RIA Services in Silverlight 4 to Build n-tier LOB application”. Free, organized by the San Francisco .Net user group.

• Event information

If you know of upcoming .Net-related events in North California that I would have missed, please let me know, and I’ll add them to the thread!