Question Converting an excel file to stand alone application

[tomkorver]

Hello,

I have no experience with VS at all but I like to ask a question about converting an excel application to a stand alone application.

Maybe one of you could give me some general advice on where to start and what software I should learn to be familiar with.

The situation is as follows:

Me (and my partner) made some excel applications for use in hospitals which are growing in popularity. However, due to the limits of Excel (and the need to have Excel to run the application) we like to make stand alone applications.

The applications are basically a database (an excel-sheet with database info) and a frontend graphical interface with various calculations and graphs which as well uses some VB-script.

What we would like for the future:

- A database that could be stored on a central server (or on the web) and preferably be highly compatible with other databases so that it could be linked with existing hospital databases.
- A stand alone application which is able to make various calculations and is able to make graphs pretty much in the same way as Excel.

I saw I can download Visual Studio Express.
Would that be a good place to start?
Will this software be sufficient for my needs?
Are there any pieces of advice one of you guys good give?

Thanks!

Tom Korver

PS - Excuse me for being a complete newbie on this!

 

[jmcilhinney]

You should certainly start with VB 2010 Express. It's free and there are no restrictions on what you can do with applications built with it. It's not as feature-rich as the paid-for editions of VS but it may provide all you need. If it doesn't, you can buy another edition of VS later and open your existing projects without issue.

You'll most likely want to get SQL Server Express as well, which is also free, to use as your database. The new 2008 R2 version that was recently released supports database of up to 10GB and the data files it uses are 100% compatible with other editions of SQL Server, e.g. Standard and Enterprise.

Microsoft released a .NET charting component a while ago as an add-in for VS 2008 SP1 and you should find that it comes standard with VS 2010. The Advanced Services version of SQL Server Express also supports Reporting Services, although I'm not sure that there's a WinForms or WPF ReportViewer control available in VB Express. In VS 2008 there was only an ASP.NET (web) version available for the Express IDE.