Code Reuse in MS Office Products

[RoseNorman]

I am doing a research paper on code reuse and am using MS Office products as the subject. Does anyone know what percentage of code within a given Office application is reused (such as Open, Save, Help functions)?

 

[Eric Lawrence [MSFT]]

Lots and lots.

Are you talking about between versions, or just between apps of the same
version? Almost all of the code for that kind of thing is shared between
all of the applications of a given version.

--
Thanks,

Eric Lawrence
Program Manager
Assistance and Worldwide Services

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

I am doing a research paper on code reuse and am using MS Office products

as the subject. Does anyone know what percentage of code within a given
Office application is reused (such as Open, Save, Help functions)?

 

[RoseNorman]

Eric - Is 'Lots and lots' a technical term? ;-

I am mostly interested in code reuse between applications withing the same version (ie the products available in Office XP). Basically, I was wondering if anyone had any statistics available on percentage of code that was reused. As mentioned in my initial post, I am writing a paper for a college class that is discussing code reuse and the benefits of it

Thanks for the reply.

 

[Eric Lawrence [MSFT]]

I'm afraid I don't have the stat about the code that's reused between the
apps of a given version, but it's very substantial. The vast majority of
the UI code is shared (toolbars, menus, task panes, dialog frameworks,
network stacks, art layout, xml parsers, etc).

The code that's not shared is generally specialized for a given app, e.g.
the recalc engine in Excel or the Slide effects in PowerPoint.

Sorry I can't give you an exact figure.

--
Thanks,

Eric Lawrence
Program Manager
Assistance and Worldwide Services

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Eric - Is 'Lots and lots' a technical term? ;-)

I am mostly interested in code reuse between applications withing the same

version (ie the products available in Office XP). Basically, I was
wondering if anyone had any statistics available on percentage of code that
was reused. As mentioned in my initial post, I am writing a paper for a
college class that is discussing code reuse and the benefits of it.

 

[RoseNorman]

Eric

I understand that determine such types of statistics is not common and that Microsoft might not have these readily available. Your response does corraborate my assumption that much of the code is resused. I would like to thank you for taking the time to respond.