Building a Real-Time Data server: Utility functions; building help, part 12
Utility functions
This is the final part of the tutorial that describes the techniques necessary to build a Real Time Data server for Microsoft Excel. If you have just come to this page, I suggest you read all parts in order, here is Building a Real Time Data for Excel, part 1.
Hoping again for re-use, I created a little utility library which contains some general-purpose functions that you may find useful.
- GetCallingAssemblyName #35#. Gets the name of the calling assembly.
- GetCurrentAssemblyName #36#. Gets the name of the currently-executing assembly.
- GetExecutingPath #37#. Gets the full path of the currently-executing assembly.
- GetMyDocuments #38#. Gets the full path to “My Documents”.
- ShowBox #39#. Drop-in replacement for MsgBox that always displays “on top”, as
a MsgBox displayed during Setup etc. often gets hidden. - ShowHelp #40#. Displays the GeodesiX help spreadsheet. This is much more complicated
than it appears, as we have to find out the path to the program associated with
Excel on the current machine (which could be 2003, 2007, 2010, etc). - Writelog #41#. Writes a message to a file with the name of the
currently-executing assembly, with a timestamp, on the path “My Documents”.
Building help from the source with Sandcastle
As an exercise, I used Sandcastle Help File Builder, which is a nice little GUI to wrap the command-line utility Sandcastle. To see how it works, download and install those 2 programs and open GeodesiX.shfbproj in the project’s root folder (it will auto-associate with SFHB). The build takes several minutes.
The result is a nice MSDN-style help file, which displays nicely with Internet Explorer but sends Google Chrome into a fit. Take a peek (don’t open with Chrome!).
I hope you found this tutorial instructive.
Building a Real Time Data for Excel tutorial:
- Building a Real Time Data for Excel server, part 1
- Building an Excel RTD: Avoiding VSTO, part 2
- Building an Excel RTD: How RTD servers work, part 3
- Building an Excel RTD: Architecture, part 4
- Building an Excel RTD: Excel, multithreading and callbacks, part 5
- Building an Excel RTD: Providing easy-to-read function names, part 6
- Building an Excel RTD: Talking to the GoogleMaps APIs, part 7
- Building an Excel RTD: Avoiding Application Domain misery, part 8
- Building an Excel RTD: Embedding a GoogleMap page in an Excel Task Pane, part 9
- Building an Excel RTD: Creating the Setup project, part 10
- Building an Excel RTD: Changing the Excel RTD Throttle Interval, part 11
- Building an Excel RTD: Utility functions and building help, part 12
One Comment
Maurice,
Thanks for an interesting walk through. I guess that You didn’t account the number of hours You put into this project.
I want to thank You for some gems I have picked up. As usual, when sharing we learn something new every day.
All the best,
Dennis