Relax, that is the key…

When the going gets hard, the key is to relax. Its been tough times for everyone, the job market sucks, the economy sucks and then as always, the job sucks (Have I missed anything….). Anyways, the best thing to do when your mind is all going berserk is to STOP. Just take a chill pill. I visited Langkawi, Malaysia few days ago, absolutely soothing view right outside my hotel window,

 IMG_0889

Abhang Rane


Managing the Unmanaged!

For the most part, I have been a managed code developer. I have been on the “good” side of the programming world if I may say so Smile. I used to have this thought in my mind all along but never actually put it on paper. I think below table represents how managed code programmers and unmanaged code programmers look at each other. This could be completely off target, but you know when I have those 5 Heinekens my thoughts really start flowing.

  Managed Unmanaged
Managed JohnnyBravo19

Orks

Unmanaged nose-picker aragon

Phew, feels good to get that out of my system. Anyways, to the content of this blog post now. The meat of this blog is writing Excel addins. There are quite a few ways to write an Excel addin. If you are using Excel 2007 and above, you could use the Microsoft Office Excel project in Visual Studio to create an addin in managed code. If you are stuck with Excel 2003, like most big nasty corporations are, you would have to take different routes,

- If you have a VBA ninja in your team (wonder why ninja is used so often in programming contexts these days…) go ahead write the whole friggin addin in VBA in an xla file. That is the cleanest way to have an Excel addin, no other dependencies. HoHooo!!

- If you and your team thinks VBA is a language of the ancient tribes, you can write managed code in a sexy language like C# may be. Although in order to expose it to Excel you have to tackle a beast called COM.

hell-beast_wide

Yup, that’s right. COM. Compile your C# code into a dll, and register it for COM. There are several sites that can help you on this, may be you can start at StackOverflow http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7092553/turn-a-simple-c-sharp-dll-into-a-com-interop-component. I had used this approach in some projects and I would say it worked well for the most part. The itchy part was upgrades. We could not have multiple versions of addins running due to COM path registration. We ran into some wrong registry entry problems on certain users machines. I mean if it has to go wrong with COM, it will go wrong in all kinds of ways.

- You could use a Managed-Unmanaged bridge that can help integrate .NET into Excel quite easily.  These are available in *.xll formats. They are also called as rapid excel development kits. Some of the xlls I have used is ManagedXLL (expensive), Excel-DNA (free!!). With these all you have to do in general is as follows,

- Create a C# class library project.

- Create a public static class and add all public static methods that you need to call from Excel. One caveat is the arguments and return types should be compatible with Excel for which you need to read the respective kits documentation.

- Place the runtime (possible just the xll file) besides the dll you just created.

- In Excel, go to Tools-> Addins and add the xll file you placed in the earlier step.

- The sheet is ready to call the methods that are exposed in your dll. No fuss no COM.

I know this seems a very rosy picture of xlls in general. Honestly I did have to understand a bit of internal structures Excel uses etc, but that was for advanced methods I was writing. For general purpose one has to just abide to the xll laws documented and write your managed code as you like.

From my personal experience, ManagedXLL gives lots of features out of the box and are easy to configure via configuration file. No doubt its expensive, but I have seen this product being used generally in big corporations where they have a site license. If you are in such a position, I would suggest start using ManagedXLL for created Excel addins. For the freelancers, free-time coders, please go and try Excel-DNA. I know ManagedXLL has support for customizing menus, status bars etc. I bet Excel-DNA would have to but not tried yet.

The biggest gain I have had with ManagedXLL is the upgrades we provide to our users. As we do not register an guff in COM, we are free to have multiple versions of addin and different locations. We need not ask users to restart Excel to get upgrades and many other happy thoughts come to my mind. Of course, not everything is good about this approach, if it was all Excel addins would have been build this way. Things like having custom types in our method arguments or return types is a bit tricky to achieve in xll world. You need to represent your custom type using a data structure or collection of data structures that Excel can plot on a sheet. This can be done via Custom Marshallers. I am just scraping the surface here, but the idea is Excel does not know about your type. You need to somehow tell it via ManagedXLL how to represent it in a worksheet. If primitive types is all you use in your methods, then its a smooth ride with such tools.

So go and play with these life savers,

Happy Managing Smile

Abhang Rane


Long time….

Boy! Its been ages since I have blogged. I owe an apology ( I know no one is reading this, I am just talking to myself) to my readers. Basically I was running behind earning more bucks and slacked on the part I loved the most. I have to say its been a hell of a ride for last 8 months or so. One thing that I have learnt the hard way, if you are a developer who loves writing good software, always are responsible for your code and all other good stuff “The Pragmatic Programmer” has outlined, then Banks are not the place for you. If you already are working in one, well you are already in Deep Shit.

You may ask, why??? Now this would be my perception of the Banking world, but I think most would agree to it. Politics overwrites almost every decision. Now this might be the case more or less in most organizations but Banks are just exclusive for these things. Basically it reminds of Joel Spolsky’s statement about the kind of job you should choose. If you are looking for just money and are ready to work in a politically motivated environment, work like a dog for long hours and are ready to get fired anytime, you are made for Banks.

There is no doubt that Banks these days heavily invest on technology. Although the kind of investment seen sometimes is just seem so wasteful. So Mr. White Shirt is Ultra Global Senior (….) President of a bank. And you know he just loves Silverlight. It should not be surprising to see all kinds of projects converting their existing working HTML code to Silverilght, because hey that is the new Thing. Every thing starts looking shiny, Mr. White Shirt gets another adjective in his titles. Few months later, a rogue trader causes the bank to loose billions of dollars, shittt!!! Layoffs begin, Mr. White Shirt is made redundant. Those Silverlight projects look quite boring now and are maintained by some outsourcing firm in India. Who wants to work on that stuff anyways. Few months later, bank is doing ok, they hire Mr. Pink Shirt. Mr Pink Shirt is high on HTML 5. So he starts an initiative to convert all the existing Silverlight projects to HTML 5 because, well that is how it should have been all along you know! And the story continues…

I think the process I explained in the above paragraph is the reason why software companies are able to sell their latest products to most banks. It is the reason why Indian outsourcing firms keep increasing their revenues year after year. The question is, as a minion in all this, you DEVELOPER, what do you do. One option is to keep minting the money, keep open mind to change technologies and be ready to get fired with your notice period. The other is to think what exactly you want to do in life. If money is the only aim, you are in a very good place. If building good software and following good processes, working in a fun environment is your thing, its time to get your resume out on the job board.

Happy Thinking!!!

Abhang Rane


Book overload

I love reading books. Technical books, techy stuff, love it! Programming stuff, new languages, new frameworks, ok I think I have made the point. I plan my week to read a book per week. Sometimes I manage to complete it, sometimes I do not. In the age of tablets and my passion for reading, I got an iPad for myself. I used for some time to read several ebooks and really liked it. But after a while, not sure if it was the continuos staring at the screen or something else, I did not find it the best way to read a book. And hence, I went to back to the old school way of reading paper books. Nothing beats this let me tell you. Not even Apple can make anything better than an "actual book in hand experience", atleast for me.

Although in the excitement of learning new stuff, I tend to get boat load of books from the library near my house. For example, at this moment I have books these lying on my table with disappointed looks on their faces,

- Real World Functional Programming With Examples in F# and C#
- Programming F#
- Domain Driven Design: Tackling Complexity In The Heart Of Software
- Domain Driven Design Using Naked Objects

I should say I am sure I am not going to get through each of them soon. I think there is a reason for this, I look at these books and think, ahh.. got to read all these books, get this done, get that done, yada yada yada and l pretty much skip the reading completely! To solve this, all I did was followed the one of the principles of software development: If you got to deliver a set of features of your software in some predecided time and the conclusion is all the features are impossible to be done in this time by yourself, you can either get more people to do this, or reduce the number of features. Getting more people in my reading activity would be absurd, so just reduce the number of books to read. I decided to get something cool done with F#, so left the F# cousins on the table and returned everything else.

At this moment, I have one of the F# books, sitting besides my lap, I think it is smiling at me, not sure!

Happy Reading!

Abhang Rane


The Married Life of a Developer...

I will not hesitate to accept that I am just an average developer who loves the joy of creation. I achieve this by building applications for the customers of my clients. At the same time, I love to share my experiences by blogging and learning from others. To quench my thirst of ever evolving technologies around us, I do like to spend time on some personal projects at home, it just keeps my brain lubricated.
I am married now, and boy, this changes things a bit okay...

I have to say, I find it difficult to take out time from my daily activities to blog, write some cool code at home and then talk about how awesome this code is on my own blog :). For some reason, at home I am always doing something! Not sure it ends up that way, but I am doing some household "stuff", be it after office on a weekday, or over the weekend.
And hence my blog posts are so rare these days. I want to change this..., uh wait, ya Ill get it from the store in a minute.....

Back to the blog, I was using Windows Live Writer for blogging and it is the best tool for the job I think. But I do not own a Windows machine anymore at home, so hooked on Mac. I am using a nice editor called Ommwriter. It does not have all the super cool, hip features of the Windows Live Writer for sure, but what it does have is the soothing music that flows in the background. The collective effect of all this is, it tries to put me back into the zone, and that is exactly what I want.

So if you, dear reader, are facing such dire situations, consider this writer http://www.ommwriter.com/.

Happy Blogging!

Abhang Rane