Can we get back to the point here? You guys who have access to Toolkit are
all set. Those of us who do not (and could never get our administrations to
ante up $20K - probably not even $20) are the ones who are really on the
edge of the universe all alone. The Pro/E free APIs gave us at least some
entry into the game, to construct our modest applications. Now PTC wants to
take even that away from us. They only provided the free APIs to answer the
challenge from Solidworks and Inventor, which provided free MS VBA APIs
(akin to Excel VBA, the most popular engineering programming API in the
world). And the Java Jlink API seemed like a viable alternative, until one
considers that it does not work with the MS Office applications via Visual
Studio. And there is no literature base for Java in conjunction with Visual
Studio - there is no market for it. Microsoft has discontinued J# (their
interim version of Java) according to Wikipedia, so those of us who work
with Excel (and most engineering programmers do), have no alternative.
If PTC wanted to consolidate their languages, why didn't they provide a free
C# API? I have heard that it is a virtual copy of Java (which would be
similar to supporting Jlink), and it is a native, supported language within
Visual Studio, which works with MS Office (and, obviously, Excel) through
VSTO.
Regards,
Dave Rosenbaum
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