Posts Tagged ‘RTD servers’

Building a Real Time Data server for Excel: Talking to the GoogleMaps APIs, part 7

This subject is already extremely well documented here, so I'll just point you to the relevant code. The call to GoogleMaps is at #7# in Geodesic.Resolve.Resolve... Read the rest of this entry →

Building an Excel Real Time Data server: Providing easy-to-read function names, part 6

Geeks like us have no qualms about typing =RTD("Geodesix.RTD",,"geocode","status","Tokyo") in an Excel cell to get a value. Normal people find this a bit clumsy, and it would be nice to humour them. Excel provides a way to this quite simply ... Read the rest of this entry →

Building a Real Time Data: Excel, multithreading and callbacks, part 5

Excel's muilti-threading is a strange beast. As we saw in part 4: Building a Real Time Data for Excel: Architecture, Excel calls happily but won't receive unsolicited calls. This is perfectly reasonable once you understand the Windows message pump, if the UI thread is waiting on a Dialog box, it can't accept other work... Read the rest of this entry →

Building a Real Time Data for Excel: Architecture, part 4

This is part 4 of the tutorial that describes the techniques necessary to build an Excel RTD server. 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. Putting together an RTD server is not particularly difficult… once you [...]... Read the rest of this entry →

Building a Real Time Data for Excel: How RTD servers work, part 3

There are plenty of articles on Excel RTD programming, but I've yet to see one that correctly addresses the issues of multi-tasking. All the examples rely on a toy timer-driven application, which is not how real-world applications work ... Read the rest of this entry →

Building a Real Time Data server for Excel: Avoiding VSTO, part 2

When I first started programming addins for MS Office, I took the obvious road of installing Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). It all seemed rather easy and I had a toy excel addin completed in the first evening. My enthusiasm was quickly doused when I tried to deploy the addin. ... Read the rest of this entry →

Building a Real-Time Data server for Excel, part 1

In my series of posts I will describes the techniques necessary to build a Real Time Data (RTD) server for Microsoft Excel. It is based on what I learned whilst coding GeodesiX, an Excel addin that uses the GoogleMaps APIs to provide Excel formulas to fulfil these functions ... Read the rest of this entry →

RTD Servers and Add-in Express 2010

Real-time data (RTD) is data that updates on its own schedule. The most common example is stock quotes, warehouse activities and web server loads. In this post, Northwind Traders has requested a sales dashboard in Excel that updates sales figures and targets dynamically by reading order information from their sales database... Read the rest of this entry →

HowTo: Create a COM add-in, XLL UDF and RTD server in one assembly

You know, a pessimist differs from an optimist by his attitude to a glass: the former thinks the glass is half empty, while the latter considers it's half full. When I was contemplating on the circumstances that made me write this post, I worked out another definition... Read the rest of this entry →

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