Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft® Visual C#™ .NET in 24 Hours

Creating an Instance of an Automation Server

Referencing a type library allows Visual C# .NET to integrate the available objects of the type library with its own internal objects. After this is done, you can create object variables based on object types found in the type library. Excel has an object called Application, which acts as the primary object in the Excel object model. In fact, most Office programs have an Application object. How do you know what objects an automation server supports? The only sure way is to consult the documentation of the program in question or use the Object Browser, which is discussed in Hour 3, “Understanding Objects and Collections.”

In this example, you'll be using about a half-dozen members of an Excel object. ...