Re: The regular yell of horror.

Hi folks,

it's time again for me to write down some of my experiences with MS
software.
Let's set the scene: I'm trying to write a small example application that
uses Excel Automation. As I don't like to use MFC for this, I do it the
ATL way, importing xl5en32.olb for type information in my project. So far,
so good. As my sample project evolves I get to a point where I want to
access a single cell of a Excel worksheet,

Excel::RangePtr spRange = spWorksheet->Range ("A1");

So no apparent reason this call fails every time with
"DISP_E_MEMBERNOTFOUND Member not found". After two hours (which costs my
boss 130 Euro, or about 170 Dollar) I finally find that the compiler
generated .tli file is buggy:

#pragma implementation_key(1092)
inline _variant_t Excel::Worksheet::Range ( const _variant_t & Cell1,
const _variant_t & Cell2 ) {
    VARIANT _result;
    _com_dispatch_method(this, 0xc5, DISPATCH_METHOD, VT_VARIANT,
(void*)&_result,
        L"\x080c\x080c", &Cell1, &Cell2);
    return _variant_t(_result, false);
}

The third parameter to _com_dispatch_method should be DISPATCH_METHOD |
DISPATCH_PROPERTYGET instead of DISPATCH_METHOD. For some reasons I cannot
simply correct this in the .tli file as the IDE keeps generating this file
at certain intervalls (about every 5 seconds, but only, and now please
button back your ears, if the mouse pointer or the cursor hovers over the
import statement in my source code). The only solution is to exchange the
import by an include of the .tlh header.
Googling the web or searching the MSDN site yields nothing. I don't want
to appear paranoid, but I think that MS has made quite some effort to let
any web site disappear that connects the words "Microsoft" with "bug
list".

Having solved this puzzle, it went on doing the work I actually wanted to
do. Pretty soon I discovered that you can only select cells of an Excel
worksheet by giving a _string_ which contains the address of the cell in
A1 notation. This looks like the most obscure thing to me as I expected
that accessing a single cell could be done by supplying two integers for
the row and the column of the cell. As things are, I have to write some
transformation function which takes two integers and returns the A1
notation as string. MS may have done things worse, but I think this would
have called for more geniality.

Phew, it was good to get this one off my chest.

Have a nice weekend,
Stuart