C
Cindy Meister
Hi Kevin
Whether you use .NET or VB6, you should develop with the OLDEST version
of Word you plan to target. I do NOT think it advisable to target Word
97...
PIAs:
PIAs are part of the Office 2003 setup. They will only install
automatically, into the GAC, if the .NET Framework is already present.
Word 2002: Microsoft provides the PIAs as a redistributable package you
can d/l from MSDN, as part of your .NET app's setup.
Word 2000: No PIAs are available. You'd have to let Visual Studio
generate a set of IAs when you set the reference to the COM object
libraries. These will be created in your application folder and you must
distribute them with your application.
Word97: the situation would be basically as for 2000, but if you're
considering creating a COM Addin, you definitely can't target Word 97.
As a general rule, Word 2002 and 2003 should be able to work with the
Word 2000 Ias.
Given your scenario, this is the route you should go. Or you can use
late-binding, as Jonathan mentions, and not have to worry about interop
assemblies. But in that case you won't be able to take advantage of
Intellisense. In this case you may want to code in VB.NET with Option
Strict OFF in the module you use to communicate with Word's object
model. Otherwise, the code will get very complicated because you'll have
to work with GetType() and InvokeMethod().
Whether you should use .NET or VB6 depends to a certain extent on the
target audience of your application and whether you need anything
specific that .NET offers. Currently, "the little guy" won't know the
difference; large corporations may have standards you want to check out.
If you do a good job designing and writing VB6 code, it shouldn't be a
big deal to "copy/paste" it into VB.NET at a later date.
-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin [mailto:[email protected]]
Posted At: 26 June 2006 07:01
Posted To: microsoft.public.word.programming
Conversation: need to use PIA? VB6?
Subject: need to use PIA? VB6?
I want to write an application with VB.Net that uses Office automation
to manipulate Word files and templates from Word 97 to the latest
version of Word.
I don't understand whether I can/must use PIAs, whether they're
appropriate only for writng an application for a single version of Word,
or whether if I want to target many Word versions I would be better off
using VB6. I can't expect that all users have .Net installed.
Can someone please shed some light on this subject? Thank you.
Kevin
Whether you use .NET or VB6, you should develop with the OLDEST version
of Word you plan to target. I do NOT think it advisable to target Word
97...
PIAs:
PIAs are part of the Office 2003 setup. They will only install
automatically, into the GAC, if the .NET Framework is already present.
Word 2002: Microsoft provides the PIAs as a redistributable package you
can d/l from MSDN, as part of your .NET app's setup.
Word 2000: No PIAs are available. You'd have to let Visual Studio
generate a set of IAs when you set the reference to the COM object
libraries. These will be created in your application folder and you must
distribute them with your application.
Word97: the situation would be basically as for 2000, but if you're
considering creating a COM Addin, you definitely can't target Word 97.
As a general rule, Word 2002 and 2003 should be able to work with the
Word 2000 Ias.
Given your scenario, this is the route you should go. Or you can use
late-binding, as Jonathan mentions, and not have to worry about interop
assemblies. But in that case you won't be able to take advantage of
Intellisense. In this case you may want to code in VB.NET with Option
Strict OFF in the module you use to communicate with Word's object
model. Otherwise, the code will get very complicated because you'll have
to work with GetType() and InvokeMethod().
Whether you should use .NET or VB6 depends to a certain extent on the
target audience of your application and whether you need anything
specific that .NET offers. Currently, "the little guy" won't know the
difference; large corporations may have standards you want to check out.
If you do a good job designing and writing VB6 code, it shouldn't be a
big deal to "copy/paste" it into VB.NET at a later date.
-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin [mailto:[email protected]]
Posted At: 26 June 2006 07:01
Posted To: microsoft.public.word.programming
Conversation: need to use PIA? VB6?
Subject: need to use PIA? VB6?
I want to write an application with VB.Net that uses Office automation
to manipulate Word files and templates from Word 97 to the latest
version of Word.
I don't understand whether I can/must use PIAs, whether they're
appropriate only for writng an application for a single version of Word,
or whether if I want to target many Word versions I would be better off
using VB6. I can't expect that all users have .Net installed.
Can someone please shed some light on this subject? Thank you.
Kevin