OWC 11 Spreadsheet with VB .NET - Install

G

Gareth

I have a VB .NET application that uses the OWC 11 Spreadsheet Component. It
seems to require that Microsoft Office 2003 Web Components be installed, as
far as I know. I tried including what I guessed to be the necessary DLLs
without any luck. I have it setup so that the installer checks for the
OWCSpreadsheet registry key and if that is not there then it tries to install
Office Web Components. Not sure if there is a better solution out there for
handling this? I have seen that on at least 1 Windows 7 computer that
registry key check apparently didn't work and the Spreadsheet did not throw
an exception, but it just did not show up on the expected forms. Also, when I
try to run the executable for OWC11 from the installation, in some cases the
executable does not open. This is presumably because of some user account
control settings or something, right? Is there a better way to do this? I
also had a check for if a form with that spreadsheet throws an exception then
it offers to install Office Web Components (which in this case, obviously
does not work). The problem is fixed by installing 2003 Office Web
Components, but I was unsure how to better programmatically determine whether
Office Web Components was already installed or if it needed to be installed?
How can you programmatically check if a program is already installed? I have
had many problems in the past with the OWC 11 Spreadsheet, but do not know of
a better alternative. I would think that there would be a nice wrapper for
the DataGridView component that emulates more of the behavior of Excel
spreadsheets with formulas and such, but I have not found any. Have thought
about biting the bullet and expanding on DataGridView, but always fell into
the trap of just trying to make sure OWC Spreadsheet worked rather than
re-inventing the wheel. Any help would be appreciated on these issues! Thanks
 

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