Version 6 IDE support

[JohnAd]

I'm in the process of looking at clearing up the library a bit to make it easier to support going forward. One thing that would make life much easier is to reduce the number of different compilers/IDEs that we support.

So I would like to drop support for MS compilers up to and including VS 2008 while adding support for VS 2013 and 2015.

I'm happy to keep support for an old version if anyone comes forward with a situation where there really need support for older compilers, please let me know if your company is still stuck on an old version of Visual Studio. Or if you particularly want support for another development environment also let me us know your story.

John

[Bart123]

Hi John,

Not sure if your 2016 plans are still "active", but if so :

1) Addition of VS2015 would be appreciated. Though a thorough handout is now available online how to set things up, some native VS2015 support would be handy.
2) I'm currently using xlw with VS2015, in a rather roundabout way :

a) I create the xlwMyLibary.cpp file using xlw, with MyLibary.h as input for CodeGenerator. But :
b) I excluded xlwMyLibary.cpp from the VS2015 solution. Instead, I copied the contents of xlwMyLibary.cpp to myMyLibary.cpp. This allows me to :

(1) add a prefix of "GL." to all routines visible in excel. It works like a namespace for my Excel routines.
So why not create a symbol like //<xlw:libraryPreFix ="GL." and process this prefix in the CodeGenerator ?
(2) remove all occurrences of IsCalledByFuncWiz(), where this is completely unnecessary, because calculations are quick;
So why not add a symbol like //<xlw:functionwizard, to allow/disallow the IsCalledByFuncWiz() routine ?
(3) replace all occurrences of " , (quote-space-comma) by ", (quote-comma) to avoid spaces at the end of the sentences in the Excel Function Wizard.
So please include this behavior in the CodeGenerator.

c) I'm now implementing a xlAddInManagerInfo12() routine. But it would have been handy if this function was already part of xlw, by adding a symbol like //<xlw:librarydescription, which then could be used as follows : //<xlw:librarydescription= "Library description as visible in Excel add-in manager"

Only once the above steps are 'done' I could start using xlw 'as intended'

Other than that I'm very pleased with the results in using this library

Best regards
Bart

[ducttapecoder]

Hi John,

On compiler support, I think it's possible to use CMake on the projects and the C++ templates. XLW could just leverage on CMake and not worry about future build systems.

Thanks for the great work.

Duc