Jamesbattle,Are you saying that C# will replace VBA in the next release of Excel? If so, when is the next release of Excel? Also, are books for learning C# available right now?Thanks for the input!

re: legacy dll's.Net does provide facilities for interacting w/ 'unmanaged' ( ie. not .Net) components.check out this article

Securitize there are plenty of books available. A visit to amazon or any other bookstore will give you some ideas.rgds,Dimitris

Securitize,I can recommend (because I have):1. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... 97-0481448, Treolson is a member of the .net design team I think2. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... 97-0481448 Eric Gunnerson C# author appearing on Microsoft site regularly, think he was involved in C# design too.and I hear good things about:3. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... 97-0481448, and here's a link to a sample chapter of his book http://www.microsoft.com/mspress/books/ ... p/5861.asp BTW the free SDK which contains the compiler and helpfiles are excellent sources of material and it to some extend debatable whether you need the books at all!I'd like to reitterate everything JamesBattle has said. The major change (not quite ready to say advantage) of C# over C++ for me is that the memory management is out of your hands just like the Java garbage collector - it is non-determistic though - but if you are not connecting DB or other resources life gets a whole lot easier!I'm also not finding much in the way of speed differences between C# and C++.

OTM and all,Thank you for the advice! I will check into these books and others as well!

Hi All,Just got back from a .NET conference and had a really good look at the .NET framework and the associated languages (especially VB.NET and C#).The concensus seems to be this: .NET somewhat makes the 'VC++ vs. VB debate' no longer relevant. The reason being that their new implementations (C# and VB.NET) results in code which gets compiled to a common 'Intermediate Language' (IL). So, whichever language you code in, the resulting IL code will be almost identical and therefore performance will also be very, very close.This means that, in general, there are fewer reasons than ever to switch from VB/VB.NET to C++/C# and vice-versa. If you are comfortable with either VBxxx or VCxxx, then you might as well continue with it.However, the great thing about .NET is that at the core exists a collection of classes ('assemblies') which are common - wether you code in C# or VB.NET. Therefore once you've mastered these classes, it becomes very easy to migrate a project from one language to the other. This collection of classes is analogous to the Java JDK classes - once you know their relationships, accessing them with C# or VB.NET makes little difference.The C# syntax is closest to Java, while the VB.NET syntax is closest to VB6 or VBA.The next version of Office will integrate with the .NET Framework, however I don't think Microsoft has divulged exactly how it is going to achieve that, and what will become of VBA.As far as integrating .NET to COM - based applications or migrating code from COM to .NET: Large COM applications should probably be left as is for now. The migration to .NET is not straight-forward even though Microsoft has a tool which automates part of the process. To find out more about integrating the two, do a search on the '.NET Interop Services'.B.

PW, Are you finding that there is no speed issue between c++ and c# too?

OTM,I havn't done enough programming with C# to be able to answer that yet.I expect there may be some difference, since C# is not compiled down to the same machine code that c++ is. However, I am told that Microsoft did a really good job with the new c# compiler/interpreter or whatever .NET term they use for it.Has anyone else compared C++/C# in terms of performance ?B.

Compile-time performance:C++/COM system: > 10 minutesC# framework: < 10 secondsRuntime:I started doing systematic benchmarking and got bored, because the performance seemedto be similar. the code compiles to a byte code, similar to Java, but it seems they've done a much nicer job AND they've hidden the VM so you won't know it's there. You always end upwith a standard EXE or DLL etc. It IS possible to compile to procesor-specific code which seems like a cool thing to do ---- actually you might find that it's not wven worth your time. Check thecost of a PC with a 1/2 gb of memory and 2 GB processor next time your out at DIXONS or KMart.Having started a career in Supercomputing ten years ago, I can tell you that the DIXONS PC isnow faster ...

Having started a career in Supercomputing ten years ago >>James,What kind of work do you do ?Do you have any experience with distributed computing / beowulf clusters ?(I'm working on a distributed computing project using .NET)

PW,What kind of success have you had with win2k and .net in clustered environments? I have heard that .net causes a few problems in server farms and clustered environments. Are you setting up a beowolf cluster using win2k?nAnooK

Nanook,Actually, I'm working on a 'SETI@Home' - type of arrangement. I.e. using the computing cycles of idle computers within an intranet. This works very well for large-scale data analysis. I'm working with a mixture of Win NT4 and Win XP workstations. The user submits data-analysis jobs through their favourite interface (Excel), and the process is pretty much transparent to them.

Pinball,I'd love to hear more about the set-up - if you are not breaching anything!I was trying to get a P2P thing going using the various levels of P2P - it's ideal for VAR/MC calculations I think - but I'm not very good at gettig it to decide the workload of each 'process'.On a lighter note, did you play with Terrarium?Kind regards.

just a remark : the portability issue has not been discussed.i am not specialist in this domain, but i would say that, in terms of portability we have :1) Java2) C/C++3) C#4) VBI mean, you never now on which platform ou will process your data in the next 3 years... from this point of view, C/C++ seems to be the best compromise in term of portability/speed, no ?currently i guess that C# or VB, your stuck with MS. But it is another debate (even if major banks have turned/are turning to linux, for their pricing clusters)