Pierre-Emmanuel Dautreppe

I will describe here an interesting scenario : what can you do when you have a VSTO project but that you want to open the file from command line (from another process) but anyway being able to access the classical VSTO method and members like Globals.ThisWorkbook, ...

Here we will see :
- how to open a VSTO document from command line (ie how to open an excel document from command line) and getting interop object
- an explanation about why you cannot convert this interop object to a VSTO object
- how you can get use of .NET remoting to access to the VSTO objects inside of your document
- and finally how you can achieve the same result using WCF [Plus]

I am currently working with finite state machine and I was wondering how we could render this easily.
To achieve this goal, I will be using Graphviz, a set of tool in C++ that can render many graphs. They are based on a structure named "dot file".
I discovered a library named "Quickgraph" created by a Belgian guy working now at Microsoft Research : Jonathan 'Peli' de Halleux. It can work with MSAGL (Microsoft Automatic Graph Layout, ex Microsoft GLEE), but as this is not free I will make work together Graphvuz and quickgraph.

In some cases the solution I present here may freeze. As a consequence, I will also present a solution to be able to workaround this problem and thus to work asynchronously with the Process object. [Plus]

When you manipulate XmlDocument, you may need from time to time to copy one XmlNode from one XmlDocument to the other one. For that you may simply use the AppendChild method but you will get the following exception : "The node to be inserted is from a difference context".
Check how you can use the "ImportNode" method to avoid this error. [Plus]

We have seen previously how to create and deploy a windows service. What we have seen also is that we can control the start type of the service to specify whether it will be launched manually or automatically. This is very interesting, however this will be used internally by windows only at the next startup of the operating system.

It seems very logical that if we install a service and that we want it to start in an "automatic way", this service shall be running at the end of the installation process, and this without any manual action. We can do this in a very easy way via the installer (I will start again from the previous installer DLL we have created). [Plus]

We have seen how to create and to deploy a windows service in C#. However this post was explaining how to use to the designer functionality to deploy our service. This is not really a problem (who wants to do himself what has already been done by another one ?) but it has a "huge" drawback. This installer needs to be next to our service. And who on earth really want to find in a same place the production code (ie the service) and the deployment code (ie the installer) ? The next step would probably to add some test code, and then...

So we will see here how we can create the installer class in a separate DLL.

We will also see what to do when you get the "Error 193 0xc1" meaning "The Service service failed to start due to the following error : My Service is not a valid Win32 application." [Plus]