One of the tools that I write and maintain displays type information for COM objects hidden behind “handles” in Excel spreadsheets. The underlying objects can either support an interface that allows them to be richly rendered to XML, or the viewer will fall-back to using metadata and displaying the supported interfaces and their properties and methods. It [...]
I’ve kinda given it away there with the title, but we had an interesting set of symptoms exhibited the other day while trying to call a function in an Excel workbook via F#. It appeared that the function being called would fail depending on what had been called previously. Very odd.
A bit of background: as you [...]
What do I mean by “featherweight debugger”? I mean implementing just enough of the debugging framework to get what we need from the debuggee and nothing more.
The problem I was trying to solve was how to get more information from first chance exceptions. We have a great deal of library code that uses catch(…) blocks [...]
Using WinDbg it’s possible to get a dump of each XLL call that is made by Excel as it calculates. If you’re using Excel 2003, create the following breakpoint that dumps the symbol at eax+4 (the entry point that is about to be called), then continues.:
bu EXCEL!MdCallBack+0xa880 “dds @eax+0×4 L1; g”
You’ll need to adjust the [...]
