Conf Saturday

The Saturday session is a chance for Excel developers to get together and discuss some of the issues facing us currently and for the next few years. This will be in an open collaborative style, with contributions welcome from all attendees. We hope to tease out some general trends, and get a sense of what areas we should focus on and which areas are in decline. If there is something you specifically want to discuss then let us know and we’ll get it on the agenda.

The projector will be available to anyone, so if you want to do a short slot bring a laptop.

There will be also be plenty of technical content and live coding. Level : from ‘Hello World’ in VSTO to writing native dlls in raw C.

Current proposed outline - subject to change.

Sat slot 1 - The Future of VBA

  • Brief history including XLM
  • VBA User types
  • Language types
  • recent language developments
  • security concerns
  • .net factors
  • Other market factors
  • Potential future directions for VBA and VBA devs

Sat slot 2 - A led discussion covering some key aspects of future programmability directions.

  • Base topics will be:
  • options for combining Excel and .net
  • VSTO - what is it? what might it mean?
  • How might the move to Web based systems affect our developments?
  • collaboration options with Excel,
  • Security - Where are things moving? what might it mean?,
  • Dev Clinic - ask the presenters and other delegates to solve specific issues
  • Other topics welcome, prior or as they come up

Sat slot 3 - Fast worksheet functions with xlls

  • Why xlls?
  • xll types
  • writing simple dlls
  • VBA declares
  • using XLM call()
  • Register()
  • The C API.
  • The Excel SDK
  • Excel4() and Excel12()
  • Commercial tools and frameworks

Sat slot 4 - A led discussion covering some key aspects of future development directions.

  • what about Excel 2007?
  • Working with Olap and Relational Data with Excel,
  • Design patterns (pros and cons of various solutions structures)
  • Non Excel options - OpenOffice, Gnumeric
  • Dev Clinic - ask the presenters and other delegates to solve specific issues
  • Business Advice - running an Excel oriented consultancy
  • Other topics welcome, prior or as they come up

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