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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T21:47:35+00:00

I intend to write a small application to scratch a personal itch and probably

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I intend to write a small application to scratch a personal itch and probably make the life of some colleagues easier. Here is what I have:

  • 10+ years of experience in C
  • Plenty of experience in programming against the Win16/32 API in C from the Win3.1 to 2000 days.
  • C library written by myself already doing about 75% of what the application shall do.

What the application shall do:

  • open a binary, feed it into the mentioned library.
  • take the resulting text output and feed it into a new Excel Workbook.
  • apply some formating.
  • integrate nicely with the Windows environment (availability in “Open With…”, remember some stuff using the registry etc.)
  • (maybe later) before giving the CSV data to Excel, parse it by looking up the meaning of some values in an XML file.

Except for the XML parsing part I have done all of that stuff before including COM / Office Automation in C/Win32. There is a lot of boilerplate code involved, but it is doable and the result will be a pretty small application without the need for an installer.

So why even think about C# / .Net?

  • no experience with parsing XML
  • the promise of less boilerplate code for the Windows and Excel stuff (yes, I have done C++ with OWL, MFC, ATL etc. but I am not going there anymore – not for free/fun)
  • Since I have also experience with C++, VB(not .Net) and a little Java / Objective-C I suppose learning C# will all be about the .Net libraries and not actually about the language.

My considerations so far:

  • Learning .NET might be fun and might result in less code / first steps in a more modern environment.
  • Sticking with what I know will lead to a predictable outcome in terms of effort and function (except for the optional XML stuff)
  • VB looked great at the beginning until the projects where about 80% done, then the pain started and the DLL coding in C. I am concerned history could repeat itself if I choose .Net.

My primary objective is the functionality. Effort is a concern. The XML parsing is optional.

Please advice.

Update: one thing I forgot to mention explicitly is that I am also worried about easy deployment of the tool to my co-workers. With Win32 I am pretty sure I can come up with an EXE file < 1Mb that can be easily emailed and does not require installation. With .Net not so much. Can I create the necessary MSI or whatever in Visual Studio Express (free) or do I need 3rd party tools?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    as others have your question mostly covered, I’d just like to quickly comment on your considerations:

    • Learning .NET might be fun and might result in less code / first steps in a more modern environment.

    Totally agreed. It is definitely fun and usually it does result in less code. The investment you make now will certainly benefit you in future projects. It is way faster to program in .Net than in C. Not only it is easier, but it is also safer. You are isolated from many programming errors common in C mostly related to memory mismanagement. You also get a very complete managed API to do stuff you would usually need to build your own framework.

    • Sticking with what I know will lead to a predictable outcome in terms of effort and function (except for the optional XML stuff)

    Hence your indecision. 🙂

    • VB looked great at the beginning until the projects where about 80% done, then the pain started and the DLL coding in C. I am concerned history could repeat itself if I choose .Net. My primary objective is the functionality. Effort is a concern. The XML parsing is optional.

    .Net is an entirely different beast from VB. Most of the things you wouldn’t be able to do in VB, or at least do them easily, are supported by .Net. For instance, Windows Services are a snap to build in .Net. Socket programming is also supported, but there are very few reasons to do it yourself, as you’ve got loads of communication APIs with .Net. You’ve got web-services, .Net Remoting, MSMQ management, and more recently WCF. Proper multithreading is supported by .Net, unlike the idiotic apartment model in VB. In case you really need to go low level, you can also actually use pointers in C#, inside of unsafe code blocks, even though I would never advise to do so.

    If you really need to do things in C, then integrating is also relatively easy. You can create COM objects and use interop to work with them from .Net. You can also interact directly with plain ol’ dlls using DllImport. Using http://www.pinvoke.net makes it easier.

    When I developed in VB, sometimes I also had to go back to C++ to do stuff that I wasn’t able of doing in VB. Since I began programming in .Net, the only extremely rare scenarios I would need to go back to C++ were when I needed to use legacy COM components that used types I was having a hard time to marshal via interop. I wouldn’t worry about history repeating itself.

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