Love the username Mycroft. and the 1980s comment. The spreadsheets in this case would generally be setup by the customer using our equipment. Our prior app just acted as a server. At the moment the argument is that all of my solutions are too complicated for the customer or won't save with the excel file. Its for industrial customers not the typical office user. I thought I might be able to get away with automation and maybe referencing by named ranges. I haven't been able to get it to work from the C# app trying to use named ranges though. Not without the app already knowing what they are. Believe me. They have heard my complaints. :laugh: This is a rarely used feature but they insist it still needs to support it without changing it much. I may have to wind up using DDE (NDDE maybe?) though I would really rather not. Thanks for the suggestions. :)

This is sort of a "What would you do in this situation" post. Our company has had a Windows program in use for many years since VB6. The short description is that this program collects data points. It also makes use of DDE to make that information available to Excel. The user enters the server and topic in an Excel cell and gets the value from our program or can set a new register to monitor. I have been asked to update the program to .NET and add some features. I am doing this is C#. DDE is of course outdated and I have been trying other alternatives OLEDB / Interop and such. The problem is that management wants all of the configuration to be on the Excel side so that its stored with the worksheet. (As it had been previously). For example my program shouldn't put a value in a specific cell. Rather it should behave like the DDE example did. and it shouldn't be using VBA to call the program via dlls or anything as the customer won't have access to that. My background is not primarily .NET and I don't do much with OLE/COM/Interop ect. I have been reading as much as I can and I have gotten to the point that if I know what cells to work with from the C# side I can get most of the functionality I want. However I have no idea how I would make this work such that the customer can specify everything about the shared data on the excel side. Any thoughts? How would you approach a solution? Edit: Edited to try to clarify that the management is really just trying to retain the functionality that the previous software versions had via DDE. As a developer I am trying to determine the best solution knowing DDE is obsolete. As of yet I haven't been able to find a newer technology that will meet the specific requirements of this tool. Its not a contentious situation or anything like that and I have no issues speaking up when I don't believe things make sense. So really the question should be rephrased as.... "How would you approach a technical solution?" Regards,

Second Hurricane Michael. Ripped off my roof and blew some walls off the house plus 12 massive pines down. (Hiland Park/Springfield area). Pretty much lost everything in the house. Insurance was a PITA. Took over a year to get our claim properly paid. Our office building in Lynn Haven got messed up pretty bad but we finally got back into it earlier this year. My office at home pretty much got spread across my back yard. The one at work lost a wall. Luckily my office desktop survived. haha.

Know how you feel on this one.. Friend: So what do you do for a living? Me: R&D Software engineer Friend: Awesome. You are good with computers! My computer is complaining about the hard-drive and makes weird noises when I try to turn it on. But no problem you can get all of my files right? Thinking to myself: Ok.. In reality if the hard-drive isn't completely dead I probably could get the files if I used up the last of what little free time I have to work on your computer for free.... Sarcasm: "I should totally do this!!" Then if you say no they get mad at you or offended.

As many other developers here have said.. We feel your pain, been there.. That being said a few things. - Be credible.. Don't promise things you cannot deliver. If you don't think demands can be met in the timeline you must tell them. Don't let fear cloud your judgement. - Demo "something". Let them know they are getting something in return other than another failure. The manager clearly has no experience with this type of project management and you will have to find a way to manage the project while making it transparent that progress is being made. - Accept some of the painful truths and move on. The longer you stew on them the more stressed you will make yourself and the less productive you will be. (I have had several projects where I thought the end would never come and when it did it would be a massive failure. Once I got a foothold in those projects it turned out to not be so bad and I learned massive amounts from them). - As others have stated there are many groups on the web (as you have found here) to get some support. Something else you might consider is to search for user groups in your area that meet. I have joined a few and it is nice to get opinions of developers who work on completely different systems and learn some new things along the way. Don't let this project consume you. Wish you good luck in your project. Hope you find your foothold.