C# or VB6 add-ins

[Shinya Koizumi]

I was asked to develop office add-ins that will connect with
document management system running on the web server using java servlets.

Seems like both VB6 and C# works with servlets. Since I am new to dotnet
I don't know about the advantage I have going with dotnet.

How could be your choice and why?

Thanks in advance.

SK

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

Strictly a personal opinion here <disclaimer>

If you only need to support Outlook 2003 or later and you have access to
Visual Studio 2005 and VSTO then you're in the best position for using C#.
It takes care of a lot of the bugs and necessary workarounds you need in
writing a straight C# application. C# will also have the advantage of not
being end of life as VB 6 is.

If you need to support multiple versions of Outlook then things get dicier.
You need to code all the workarounds yourself, deal with shimming and all
the other gotchas of straight Interop development.

No matter what you suffer a performance loss by going through the Interop.

If end of life for VB 6 doesn't matter and you have to support multiple
versions of Outlook you're probably best off working in VB 6, the
workarounds are all published and documented on the Web and the performance
is better.

For what it's worth I do almost all of my own and my commercial addins for
clients using VB 6. For me at least .NET is not a compelling story for
Outlook.