January 2006

Free (Visual ) BASIC and more!!!!

So I’m looking for a free BASIC complier that I can use commercially. There are quite a few around , but I really need a GUI. JustBASIC seems ok, if not a little lite weight , hey you get what you pay for!!!.

FreeBASIC looks very impressive, but I need to check out the licensing. Importantly FreeBASIC is supported by the FBIDE and JellFish Pro IDE’s. The latter of which looks quite powerful.

This is well and good, but it not the most exciting thing I found”¦..


SpeedBasic+. It’s not complete and I don’t know if the project is still alive, but it looks very, very cool!. Products like Turbo Excel and KD, don’t, as far as I understand compile VB sub’s or win forms (Turbo Excel, compiles VBA functions to C++) , SpeedBasic looks to be even more powerful.

So what’s is like in practice? And will it work with VBA. Time, my friend will tell! Fingers crossed!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Concise XML

A large spread sheet saved as XML can lead to some big files, there hard to understand – for me anyway:
Eric Bachta has a cool solution, he writes his own simple XML!

I wish there as some kind of add-in for pre 2003 excel which allows XML to be used in it – properly! Any one know of such a thing?

XLL update

David Gainer was kind enough to answer the mulit thread .xll question

Excel 97 does not support multi-threading. I can see what I wrote was confusing. What I meant was that if you had some XLLs that you have been using for some versions that you want to participate in mult-threaded calc, you can recompile them after adding the flag and they will work you don’t need to update anything to use the Excel12 API. Is that clearer?

If you’ve not seen Dave’s blog check it out, Dave keeps it updated and replys to many of the comments, very good work!

Differences between these two types of Add-ins.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;291392

this is for me really. :-)

2 xll type links

XL dennis posted these links over at Dave Gainer Blog, useful, I must read PED also.

http://blogs.msdn.com/eric_carter/archive/2004/12/01/273127.aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q178474