Excel and .NET

In connection with Microsoft's .NET offensive, it should be mentioned that Office 2000 and 2002 are not yet .NET compatible. Even the forthcoming Office edition scheduled for release sometime in 2003 will not be based on .NET, according to current word from Microsoft. But that is no reason for tears. If Microsoft were someday to decide actually to convert the Office suite to .NET and the new programming language VB.NET, then there would be a great number of compatibility problems built into Excel.

An important function of .NET, namely, the so-called web services, can already be used with Excel 2000 and 2002 without compatibility problems. The Web Services Toolkit, a simple and freely distributed extension of the VBA development environment, makes this possible. (Details on the use of this toolkit appear in Chapter 14.)