Using Components via .NET or COM - any advice?! 1

[kaywarner]

Hi All, thanks for reading the post.

I was wondering if anyone could help me with some advice on .NET and COM communications in Delphi.

I have downloaded a free component pack and have the option to communicate with the Methods in the Type Library via .NET or COM.

As a very basic programmer (i.e. file in, do math, number out type programmer) I have never needed to use these before.

My new project will (eventually!!) access data in a Excel file, use the methods in the new Type Library to do some math, then graph the results.

any advice/opinions/comments etc would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, kay

 

[DjangMan]

Search on Deborah Pate. She's written articles about COM and Delphi. Sometimes the tricky part with COM is getting the interface up and running. After that you're generally good. Delphi can create the wrapper for you and then you include that code in your Uses section.

 

[kaywarner]

Cheers for that DjangMan, thats awesome stuff.

I'm slowly getting the hand of where i'm going with it and it looks like I will stick with COM.

Delphi for .Net looks a little too much for me.

thanks, kay

 

[TonHu]

You could do all that just as easy in C#, using the Express Edition of Visual Studio. No need to make funny connections from Delphi to .NET or COM, accessing Excel in the same near clumsy way, and present some graph of that.
And C# isn't that much harder then Delphi (I know, use 'em both and love 'em both), and seems more suitable in this combination.

 

[kaywarner]

Thanks for the post TonHu, This had crossed my mind, can you program using both languages?

Which did you learn first and How did you find the transition from one to another?

 

[TonHu]

I learned Pascal in 1984, programmed in Basic, Turbo Pascal and Clipper for years, later used Delphi, then learned Cobol, Java and C#. And in the meantime a little php, and some other smaller scripting languages.

It's not 'learn a language a year', or I should have done 25+ languages, but yes, it's quite easy to switch from 1 to the other