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I'm looking for suggestions on the Visual Studio approach to take for a web application that is in the conceptual stage.

My environment has a lot of tools:

  • Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard 64bit
  • Visual Studio 2010 Professional Edition
  • Sharepoint 2010 Server Enterprise Edition
  • SQL Server 2008 R2
  • Office 2010 Professional

I know I will need this app to retrieve data from a database (or a web service - not sure exactly at this point). The data needs to be placed in an Excel workbook dynamically. The app will need to have a nice user interface (standard web controls - perhaps with some Javascript effects). The Excel ribbon and worksheet grid will need to be hidden. Some web control(s) will cause the Excel chart(s) to be rendered.

I am thinking this sounds like Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) so as to leverage .Net and hide Excel.

Can you offer suggestions regarding: One ASP.Net Web App Project One Class Library Project for Excel or perhaps which one of the several different Excel 2010 project types (addin, template, document)

Would Excel Services for Sharepoint be useful (or required) ?

I am feeling a little overwhelmed with so many choices at this early stage of conceptualizing the app. Can you suggest some ideas for this sort of thing? Also, I am a bit more experienced with C# but I've read VB.Net is better for work with the Excel object model.

What are general advises with regard to tool choice and overall approach tradeoffs?

BЈовић
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John
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1 Answers1

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If you need to only show charts to the user, you can generate those on the fly and display them as a part of the web page. Look into ASP.Net chart controls. There are some other commercial chart components. If the information is relatively static, you can pre-build charts and refresh them as needed. You can accomplish everything from one ASP.Net web project. You can also create a class library to generate charts if you plan to use charts somewhere else.

If my answer does not help, please clarify your scenario. Do you need to use all the tools? Do you have to make charts available in SharePoint? Do your users have to have the Excel documents as backup source to validate data (you can still do that from ASP.Net app though)? If you could elaborate more on your end product, that would help.

Eugene
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