14 DAY TRIAL // Developers building add-ins for the next iteration of Office Excel now have the necessary development resources to do so from Microsoft. At the start of this month the Redmond company made available for download Excel 2010 SDK: Excel 2010 XLL Software Development Kit. The SDK, obviously a Beta just as Office 2010 Excel, is designed to allow devs to take advantage of Excel 2010 functionality in order to build XLL add-ins. In addition, the release is also set up to bring to the table new "power UDF" capabilities.
Microsoft is defining XLLs as add-ins designed especially for Excel. XLL developers typically take advantage of compilers which come with DLLs (dynamic link libraries) support, the software giant revealed.
“The purpose of the SDK is twofold,” Microsoft explained. “To make sure that all relevant Excel 2010 functionality is available to XLL add-in developers. This includes all new worksheet functions, and the ability to create 64-bit versions of XLL add-ins. To introduce two exciting new "power UDF" capabilities: Asynchronous UDFs; and remoting function calls to HPC (High-Performance Computing) clusters.”
Microsoft is promising that with the continuous evolution of Office 2010, and inherently, Excel, devs will not be left hand out to dry. The company intends to build upon the Excel 2010 XLL SDK, and in this regard, developers will have an updated version of the software development kit available after the final release of Office 2010. In mid-November 2009, the beta development milestone of Office 2010 was offered to the general public. The General Availability deadline for the next iteration of the Office System is reportedly set for June 2010, although this is yet unconfirmed by Microsoft.
“Asynchronous UDFs are exactly what they sound: you can create a user-defined function (UDF) which starts some asynchronous process (such as sending out a request) and immediately returns. Excel tracks the pending result. When the result becomes available, the add-in sends it back to Excel through a call-back function. This lets you send out many external requests at the same time, to be concurrently run on external resources,” Microsoft added. “In addition, if you have a High-Performance Computing cluster (aka a "grid"), you can register existing, synchronous functions as "cluster safe", and have Excel automatically send calls to them to be executed remotely and asynchronously on the cluster - without needing to rewrite the functions as asynchronous.”
Excel 2010 SDK: Excel 2010 XLL Software Development Kit is available for download here. Office 2010 Beta 14.0.4536.1000 is available for download here.