Hi

I've written a bunch of financial analysis stuff in VBA user defined functions as part of a model and I'm talking to a potential user (a major bank) who doesn't want to use it in Excel but instead wants a DLL they can address from their systems. I'm kind of thinking I could move my VBA stuff over to Visual Basic (which I've never used, but hey, it's basic after all!) and then use this to migrate the functionality to a DLL.

I really have no idea if this is a viable strategy and wonder if anyone could advise or suggest a viable alternative. I'm pretty comfortable with VBA but haven't done anything like C or C++ before.. I did suggest an Add-In but that didn't seem to cut it for them.

Thanks for any advice

Pavesa

VB.Net is not similar enough to VBA so that you can move it over. You'd do better to learn a new language and rewrite it. Try c#

I did something like this with one of my add-ins. I moved the proprietary code into an ActiveX DLL using VB6. In VB6 all you need to do is move the code into the DLL. Existing VBA code needs very little modification.

Then you compile ("make") the DLL file and distribute it to your end users.

There's a simple explanation here: http://www.vb-helper.com/howto_activex_dll.html

__________________
Regards,
JP
JP SoftTech

Hi JP

thanks very much for the guidance. The question that comes to mind is how widely usable is an ActiveX DLL? Does it have limitations or is it really like any other DLL? I guess the bank I'm talking to are running some kind of Enterprise Oracle system or something, maybe with a lot of proprietary non-Microsoft based stuff, so are ActiveX DLL's universally usable?

Andrew

You could try asking their IT people. As long as their software has some kind of COM interface, you could use an ActiveX DLL. That's my understanding.

__________________
Regards,
JP
JP SoftTech

Hi JP

thanks very much for all the advice. I'll talk to their IT people, thanks to your help I now have a suggestion for the discussion

Best regards

Andrew