The PIAs are hand-tuned to improve upon the interop assemblies that can be
automatically generated by VS, so those wouldn't be entirely compatible.
I have seen more than one person state that the PIAs themselves are not
particularly interchangeable. Here's an example from
http://blogs.msdn.com/eric_carter/ar...ory/4620.aspx:
***
In my previous post I wrote this--but then removed it:
"Note that the Office XP PIAs will work against either Office XP or Office
2003. This is because the PIAs are backed by the COM object models of
Office that are versioned in such a way that the OM of Office XP is a proper
subset of the OM of Office 2003. In other words, if you use the Office XP
PIAs, you get the benefit that your code will work against Office XP and
Office 2003, but you don't get to use any of the cool new developer features
of Office 2003 (like ListObject, XML Support, etc.)."
Although this should be true in theory, it turns out that in practice there
are some areas where the XP PIAs will blow up when you use them against
Office 2003. One example I've been told is that if you are an add-in and
you call Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Application.Open() using the XP PIAs
with Office 2003, you can crash Word.
So the current recommendation from Microsoft is not to use Office XP PIAs
with Office 2003.
Based on this it looks like you will have to intall all the PIAs and select
the correct one at runtime based on the Excel version you are dealing with.
I would Google around and see if anyone has some framework code to sort that
all out, before reinventing the wheel.
--Bob
"J-T" <J-*@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:eU**************@tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl...
I'm trying to read an excell file in my .Net application using Office XP
Primary Interop Assemblies
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...c_oxppias.asp).
I have installed Office 2003 on my developemnt box.Will my application be
able to read all kinds of Excell file (97-2000-2003)?
Dose the wrapper that .Net framework generates backward copatiable?
Do I have to have the same version of Office in production too?
Thanks a lot
Bruce,