ExHale Launch

As some of you will already be aware, we made public the beta of ExHale this week, we produced a VB.Net and a C# tutorial (available here).  But already we are been asked what makes our solution unique?

Stability 

We wanted the solution to be rock solid, no one could cause it to mysteriously stop working by installing a 3rd party Excel add-in, updating Excel, or registry corruption!  If the user has no .Net installed, or .Net security settings prevent execution, a useful error message should be shown, rather than just the silent failure that is all too synonymous with existing methods.

Deployment

The problem with automation, and the existing .Net Excel development platforms is they don’t make for easy deploying multiple add-ins, versioning, disaster recovery, even just running the code from a network share is a challenge.  So that it can be fully integrated into a banks existing deployment system and support unit testing, this has to be client extendable.

Isolation

App.Config files are very useful, and many people lament their demise, we wanted to bring them back into Excel, and provide AppDomain isolation for each individual add-in.

Development

Anyone who has written a COM Automation add-in will be used to the situation where their add-in simply does not appear in Excel, plenty of head scratching is often required to find the obtuse reason why it was not loaded.  ExHale was designed to provide useful feedback from its beginnings, as such if you fail to include a dependency, throw an un-handled exception in you constructor, or even fail to include a constructor the developer is told immediately.

Code Clarity

Writing Automation add-ins does not provide the most efficient readable code, we wanted to use modern declarative aspect oriented programming paradigms to allow for much faster development.  Allowing people to focus on solving the business problem, rather than the technical one. Overcoming Limitations: Been limited on how many cells one can return is a major problem when developing market data distribution add-ins, ExHale from conception does not have this limit.  With COM there is no real control of the appearance of functions in the Function Insert Wizard, with ExHale this had to be incredibly simple.

Whilst we’ve now achieved all of these goals, there are still plenty more features we want to add, feel free to message me your top requests!