Visual Studio/Visual Basic 2010 Smartsheet & API - visual-studio-2010

I am developing an application that is using smartsheet as the database tables, with a visual studio 2010/visual basic off line app to make a report (purchase order).
The smartsheet odbc is not working great and i need to put data back to smartsheet at the end of the process.
Ideally i am looking to avoid going to C# for this project as i have never done coding in this language.
Smartsheet does support https api, but i am not sure if this will actually work?

The Smartsheet ODBC driver is READ ONLY and doesn't support sending updates back to your sheets. It will only pull data out from Smartsheet.
The Smartsheet API is your best bet to work with the data in your sheets to pull data from them and update the data as well.
There is a C# SDK to help make working with the Smartsheet API easier.
There are also sample apps for both C# and VB.net that how to get started interacting with the Smartsheet API.

Related

How to port existing vb .net office add-ins to work with office for mac?

I have an Office Word add-in that I wish to make it work with Office Word 2016 for Mac. I tried looking into official Microsoft documentation and could not find anything. I want to reuse as much code as possible while still having the extension to work with older versions of Word as well as Office Word 2016.
Is there any way to do this? Any help, even if it is something remotely related to this is appreciated.
TL;DR;
There is no way to do that.
Microsoft has bet on a new technology suite also called Office add-ins but web based. They are compatible with Mac. The old COM based approach (on which VSTO .NET add-in are built on) are legacy.
There is no way to reuse .NET code with this new technology, except of course to port business logic to the web server (which serves the web based add-in).
More reading on the comparison with the two add-ins generation: see this article I wrote
I second Benoit's answer. In addition, Not sure how complex is your add-in in terms of interactions with the document content, or if its a service that then inserts or imports data from a backend. Depending on that you will have more reusable code.
I would recommend you to do a full analysis on what APIs you need for your add-in to work properly. The new model offers big value with both supporting multiplatform and an easier deployment model. It also provides many rich APIs you can use, however the API depth its still not as rich as VSTO. Our goal is to get there.
I would be curious to understand if there are any gaps on you migration analysis.
thx!

What is the best way to migrate online application to offline

I have a certain online application that generates reports(and prints them) based on some repository of information. Now I would like to make an offline application which is provides the same experience and in which the repository is pre-loaded into the users' computer. What is the best way to convert this online app to offline app. The first thing that came to my mind was setup a local server and database. This ensures the experience is consistent. But I'm open to other options, such as storing the data in a file system and then loading it via flash/flex based apps or C# or Java. The objective of this offline app is to provide the functionality(report generation) to users where internet is not feasible.
I am not sure about the windows aspect of your question, but if I was doing an offline web based page(s) I would be looking at a LocalStorage database (though it does have some downsides), but there are other alternatives such as WebSQL and IndexedDB.
If you have reports, do they still have value when they are out of date? Do you need to store the configuration of those reports or is it all just read only?
Shameless self promotion, I have a project that is designed to handle database synchronization, though it's not done, it's close. You can see it (with an ugly but very functional) demo at https://github.com/forbesmyester/SyncIt

Is webmatrix appropriate for a "private" web app?

I would like to build a web interface for an app I build for a client. The app itself is made with Access for the front-end, and SQL Server for the database.
The idea is to allow them to check the stock of an item, or see the orders of a client using a laptop or even a smartphone, while on the road.
I have a basic experience with html and CSS, since I made a few simple sites.
My question is: would webmatrix be a good choice for that job ?
Since I master VBA and SQL quite well, and the client is a MS environment anyway, I thought webmatrix could be an easy path for that project.
Any feedback appreciated. Other suggestions are welcome. Thanks.
We have a very similar environment. We have a legacy application developed in Microsoft Access running against SQL Server 2005. Initially we developed a single page website using WebMatrix that had some key data displayed on it. Over time, it's grown to having maybe 30 pages, with both employees and customers logging in to it. It's my plan to gradually replace the Access application completely with a WebMatrix application.
Generally, the WebMatrix development enviromnent is quite competent for simple pages and I like its lightweight quick-to-boot easy-to-use approach. On some of the more complicated pages that use c# classes, I will switch to Visual Studio.
Since you have some experience with HTML and CSS, then I think the razor syntax that WebMatrix uses is a natural progression. If your only language experience has been vba, you might have some challenge using c# or perhaps vb.net. I would recommend c# as being more of an standard.
Good luck!

excel, mysql (with authentication)

We are creating an excel plugin but need some guidance as we're new to excel development (but not new to programming).
Here's what we want: Once the user installs the plugin, they will authenticate w/ our server to ensure they are a subscriber to our service (the plugin will save login info and password so they don't have to enter credentials everytime). From there, the user will be able to type in custom formulas (UDFs) in Excel and pull data from our mysql database.
Here's what we've tried:
We started w/ VisualStudio (C#) and got excel to output some mysql data when the spreadsheet starts up. Looking into it further, people have suggested to use ExcelDNA to create UDF's. So, we did some reading on ExcelDNA and have created a helloworld xll but haven't been able to find anything on how to authenticate the user. Should we be using ExcelDNA? VisualStudio? Something entirely different? thx!
Excel-DNA is exactly right library to use (I'm the developer, but still...).
You would probably use Visual Studio as your IDE to make the .NET assembly with functions and macros in. But your .NET .dll will be integrated into Excel using the Excel-DNA .xll instead of the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) libraries that ship with Visual Studio Professional.
Nothing in Excel-DNA (or any of the other add-in frameworks I know of) gives you a pre-built implementation of the authentication feature you ask for. But implementing it yourself should not be too hard - you'd do your check and possible username/password prompt in the AutoOpen handler of the add-in, and enable or disable the functionality based on the result from your web call. You should be a little bit careful if you are making a potentially slow web request during the add-in load...
You could also implement the log-in via ribbon interface, with an indicator of the current status and a button to log in. That way users would not be confused about why your add-in 'is not working' when the functions are disabled.
On the Excel-DNA CodePlex site http://exceldna.codeplex.com there are links to other projects based on Excel-DNA. The best place for support is the Google group at http://groups.google.com/group/exceldna. I also monitor the 'excel-dna' tag on StackOverflow, but often the group is nicer for ongoing back-and-forth discussions and explanations.

Microsoft CRM 4.0 data migration

I'm in the middle of a contract that is porting a company's hand-rolled Microsoft Access-based CRM to Microsoft CRM 4.0. It's all gone pretty well, but now I have to migrate the data across.
The data is all over the place in the source .mdb. Lots of tables, lots of duplication, and generally shows all the signs of an ad-hoc database which has grown organically (like weeds) over time.
So, my dilemma is this. Do I bite the bullet and write lots of queries inside Access to export the data into some intermediate format that CRM can somehow import? Or is there some other way? Are there any middleware tools that map data from one to the other that anyone here knows about?
Note this is my first time using CRM, so if the question is obvious, I appologise.
Cheers,
Shane
Dynamics CRM 4.0 provides built in tool called Dynamics CRM 4.0 Data Migration Manager to help developers migrate data from previous database into Dynamics CRM 4.0 database. I haven't used it extensively, but as far as i know, the previous data needs to be exported into a "standard" excel format provided by CRM 4.0 Data Migration Manager (DMM).
You can refer to below references :
http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2008/01/04/microsoft-dynamics-crm-4-0-data-migration-manager-with-john-o-donnell.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6766880a-da8f-4336-a278-9a5367eb79ca&displaylang=en
There is also 3rd party solutions called Scribe http://www.scribesoft.com/ that will help you migrate to Dynamics CRM 4.0 database
I've had success just using the mscrm api in these kinds of cases. You can write a .net app which use odbc to connect to your mdb then use the mscrm api to create the entities you need on that end.
Anyway you cut it - it's not too pretty but you can get the job done.
Good luck.
Ms CRM Service Reference
I am sorry to say, I think you have to bite the bullet and write queries to pull the data from various sources and use some intermediate database like access ( You may also use SQL server or any db)
In my experience of handling several data migration projects for various small and large enterprises, I have always uses MS access as my data massaging/pulling tool. It works great. It might sound a lot of work but it’s is definitely lot cheaper than buying any expensive tools and spending thousands of dollars configuring them.
I would recommend you save all your queries and write a macro to automate the import.
Hower trivial the query is, SAVE it. This will be very useful as you will have to do this again and again before you actually go live.
Once you automate it, it is just a matter of clicking a button.
Typically and data migrating project will undergo at least 2 iterations and it could go up to 10.
Once you have data in the intermediate database, you can use de duping tools to standardize and remove dups from your data. There are a lots of cheap tools available both online and offline.

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