Visual Basic (Studio 2005) DLL called from VBA for Excel (error 453)

[geiaaa]

hello and happy new year...
I just started a project were I need to call dll functions from within excel.
More specifically I have created a custom dll in Visual Basic (visual studio 2005) with the following code:

Public Class main
 
    Public Function sayHi() As String
        Return ("Hello world\n")
    End Function
 
End Class
 

then I try to call this from excel using

Declare Function tellme Lib "c:\shipping_VB.dll" Alias "sayHi()" () As String
 
Public Sub myClick()
    MsgBox tellme()
End Sub
 

I also tried to change the alias to main.sayHi() and both these without the parenthesis...

finally I tried to make a new VB (2005) project as bellow:

Public Class Form1
 
    Public Declare Function DeclareBeep Lib "kernel32" Alias "Beep" _
        (ByVal dwFreq As Integer, ByVal dwDuration As Integer) As Integer
 
    Declare Auto Function sayHi Lib "c:\shipping_VB.dll" () As String
 
    Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
        MsgBox("hi")
        DeclareBeep(10000, 1000)
        MsgBox(sayHi())
    End Sub
End Class
 

sadly I get the first msgbox, I get the beep but I still get an 453 error on my own custom function!!! the application finds the dll, but not the function within it!
can anyone PLEASE tell me what I am doing wrong, because I am sure it's something really stupid that I can not see at the moment...