For anyone using Excel automation in .NET or ASP.NET applications, you'll find several answers to the age old question haunting many newsgroups, blogs and forums:  "How do I kill Excel?".  After outlining how to configure and start an Office app within your .NET desktop or ASP.NET application, this article shows you how to properly dismantle and close the specific instance of Excel that you had started.  For the interested student this article will explore several important Windows concepts that apply well beyond the usage of Excel:  including COM interop/config./management, the .NET Process class, and how to use “PInvoke” to call Windows API methods not implemented in the .NET Frameworks. [read article...]

Learn about Windows Services, how they work, and what they are for.  Build your first Windows Service and end up with a reusable template with which to create many more.  Tips for use, development, and deployment of a Windows Service. [read article...]

There is one way to make explicit reference to a particular version of an ActiveX COM component for .NET Interop. The example used here is to make automation of Microsoft Excel backward compatible. Visual Studio will not allow you to reference older versions if Excel 2003 is already installed on your machine--so your program will not work once deployed to other machines that may have prior versions. This article includes a method for building your own Interop DLL for deployment using a command line tool from the .NET SDK. [read article...]

This article includes eight suggestions for Best Practices in exception handling in .NET, with code examples.  Learn how to properly catch, identify, raise, log, and respond to errors encountered by applications of all types. [read article...]

Have you ever created a file twice with the same name?  Do you use the CreationTime property of files to perform some task such as logging, or time-keeping?  You may be interested to know that CreationTime may not really be the time that a file was created.  In fact, it can be off by months. [read article...]