HELP Why so few contributions to office.developer.web.components G

[Perico]

Am curious why there seems to be only one major contributor, Alvin, to the
above news group.

I have asked a number of questions about XML support for the Spreadsheet Web
component, with zero response. That tells me an insufficient number of MVP's
are examining this technology, or that there something innate about the
technology that is undesireable. What is it?

It also seems that with the future gravitating to Web Services, and Google
like web based spreadsheets, and the capability of the Office Web components
as far as putting a Excel spreadsheet on the Web with full scripting
capability, this would be an attractive feature, particularly if there is
self-validating XSD/XML support for data entry into the Spreadsheet component.

Is the unpopularity of that group and those features due to Microsoft
steering away from COM in their .NET architecture, or security issues,
marketing issues, or other factors?

 

[Guest]

Here's my take on it as a developer and user.

Just because they're called web services doesn't mean the UI has to be
HTML-based. Web based UIs can't hold a candle to Win32 forms apps. They are
difficult to use and are much more limited. Google spreadsheets are a
complete joke and are not even close replacements for MS Excel, which is one
of the most powerful apps around.

The notion that everybody will eventually have thin clients that don't need
any apps at all, but instead simply use a browser to download everything "on
demand" doesn't seem like a viable alternative, in my opinion. By the way,
that idea has been floating around for the last 10 years or so.

While I find some aspects of the web appealing, I find they can't come close
to offering the power or ease of my desktop apps. Especially ones where
users have to interact with it. I spent quite a bit of time on a web-based
front end to a reporting engine, and I have to say it was one of the worst,
most unappealing things I ever did at that job. Horrendous UI with NO
shortcuts and so on. As a client, I would not want to spend a lot of time in
that environment. As a developer, I don't recommend such environments.

Microsoft has added tremendous flexibility to their Win32 .Net applications.
With a web service, I can download a dataset as XML and have quick and easy
access to my data, but I don't need an HTML framework to do that.

 

[PCLIVE]

I don't know when you've asked questions...but one thing you might consider
is that many people are on vacation this time of year (just before Labor
day...at least in the US).

Regards,
Paul

 

[Ronald Dodge]

I can't speak for others. I'm also relatively new in regards to .NET stuff
which I been going through some training courses to get my MCSD
certification, .NET does have some good features in it such as using MSIL to
allow for various programming languages to be written into one language.
However, the one major draw back for me is the fact that .NET does away with
the GoTo feature entirely with only a Try, Catch in it's place for error
trapping.

While I agree with MS that a lot of people have used the GoTo feature in
improper manners, thus created bad programming practices, I don't agree with
them getting rid of the feature solely on that account as stated in the
training material. There are still minor few reasons why I use the Goto
feature, which in that regards, by .NET programming not having this feature
in place, something that would be a quick and easy thing to do on a
temporary basis, the job in those kinds of situations is made so much
tougher and one has to go through a lot more work. This hurts for minor
tasks and it also hurts for when debugging as we now have to put in a lot
more work in error coding before we can even check for errors in some cases,
primarily those that deals with recursives are the examples that I'm
thinking of as with the .NET programming. I would have to comment out a
bunch of lines rather than just put in a label line and a goto line before I
could even begin debugging in some cases, then convert them back to codes on
an as needed basis.


That would be like me telling you that you can't ever use the Activate or
Select methods in Excel cause of the fact that so many people use them
improperly as a result of the macro recorder putting those methods into the
code, and then those 2 methods gets removed permanently from Excel in a
later version as a result of the bad programming. While one should be
refering to workbook, worksheet, chartsheet and range objects (either via an
object variable or directly) in as many of the cases as they reasonably
could to avoid some of the issues related to using those 2 methods and
active objects, there are those rare exceptions when you can't avoid using
such methods and objects reasonably speaking.
--

Sincerely,

Ronald R. Dodge, Jr.
Master MOUS 2000

 

[Guest]

..Net has On Error Resume Next as well as Goto 0, etc.

 

[gimme_this_gimme_that]

1. For starters, with a few exceptions, MVPs post on
microsoft.public.* newsgroups.

Some MVPs are microsoft buffs who prefer not to use groups.google.com,
and some of these guys prefer to post from microsoft sites.

2. While many MVP's have decades of experience using Office, many
don't have experience developing with other tools such as Visual
Studio (as in developing COM objects or WebParts) or Sharepoint (as in
developing dashboards that use spreadsheets as their source of
information).

MVPs are retired guys and book writers, mostly. So you won't see them
going into Office Components if they are retired, and they won't go
into unless a publisher asks them to write a book on a hot Office
Component topic.

3. Some developers would take issue with your declaration that the
future gravitating to Web Services. It *might* be the case that B2B is
migrating to Web Services, but that's about it. But within the
enterprise it's easier to pass around database connections and assign
read and write permission within the database.

4. Excel has had on-again-off again support for SOAP and XML. Some of
the support for XML is half baked. For example if you Data->Import-

XML and drag and drop transform that looks great, but you can't apply

that transform to an XML file that has hundreds of elements with each
element requiring a transform, so the functionality is mostly useless.
(I haven't tried Excel 2008 though.)

5. There is no evidence that enterprise companies are using Google
spreadsheets. My understanding is that you can fill a Google
spreadsheet with millions of numbers on the back end with Python -
well, need I say more? How many Office/Python developers are migrating
to Google spreadsheets.

If you *really* want to do UNIX and spreadsheets you can use OS X, MS
Office for OS X, AppleScript, and VBA.

6. .NET is a popular platform. Dice it for yourself. If you're a .NET
wiz you can get a dream job (just like you might if you have a lot of
experience with Java).

 

[Perico]

Your response appears to be the most relevant to my question. Some of the
other responses appear way off the mark as far as my question (especially the
guy talking about "Goto". Thanks. I'm very curious whether I can use xml
with the Spreadsheet component. We'll see.