Comment Joel doesn't know Jack (Score 1) 259
I've seen multiple links to Joel's advice. It's bad advice. He is talking out of his ass.
Do not under any circumstances run a server that automates Microsoft Office unless you can afford to pay an intern or maybe a homeless person to babysit the server 24/7. They will have to close dialog boxes when it gets stuck waiting for user input and reboot the server ocassionally because of memory leaks. Anyone that has tried to do anything with the file formats has gone this route and given up.
There is a very robust and competitive market for third-party developer components that read and write Office file formats for most popular development platforms. This is the way to go. or use Apache POI if you can put up with the missing features.
Do not under any circumstances run a server that automates Microsoft Office unless you can afford to pay an intern or maybe a homeless person to babysit the server 24/7. They will have to close dialog boxes when it gets stuck waiting for user input and reboot the server ocassionally because of memory leaks. Anyone that has tried to do anything with the file formats has gone this route and given up.
There is a very robust and competitive market for third-party developer components that read and write Office file formats for most popular development platforms. This is the way to go. or use Apache POI if you can put up with the missing features.
