Excel addin development environment

Question

If I want to build an excel addin with C++. Is there any opensource/freeware alternative to the Visual Studio development environment?

Thanks

Dean

Answer 1

For interfacing with excel you can use should check out XLW. I'm not sure on it's current state of development or if it is updated for the current version of excel. With excel 12 they added some features for larger data sets, more rows and columns and a multi-threaded calculation engine.

As far as compiling the code you can use MinGW. You can also download the express editions of Visual Studio if it is for yourself. If you are working commercially, just get Visual Studio. It's that good.

Answer 2

Free? How about Microsoft Visual C++ Express Edition?

The former Borland C++ Builder compiler also appears to be freely downloadable. Not sure about version, though, and you'd need some way to edit/debug.

Then there's something available in Eclipse

There are plenty more. See this list

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