Pros and cons of VSTO vs Excel-DNA? [closed]

Question

As far as I understand VSTO and Excel-DNA offer two different solutions for getting .NET code into Excel. One solution is open-source and the other solution is developed by Microsoft. What are the pros and cons of each solution, today and going forward?

Answer 1

VSTO
+ is suitable for large-scale team development
+ If you already have Visual Studio Pro its free
+ good for COM addins & UI development
+ Microsoft product
- performance of .NET-Interop is poor
- Still difficult to handle multiple Excel versions
- significant learning curve for VBA user
- no UDF support

Excel DNA
+ Excellent UDF performance (XLL-.NET)
+ suports both the COM - Interop and the XLL interfaces
+ easy to use and deploy
+ use with or without Visual Studio
+ Free and open source
- Not well documented but excellent support group

You should also consider Addin Express which, like Excel DNA, supports both the COM interface and the XLL interface and has many wizards for building things. But its not open source and its not free.

Answer 2

My limited conclusions from my limited experience with both.

VSTO cons

• Requires Visual Studio Pro (i.e. not free)
• Compiling and running a project takes at least 30 seconds each time. Huge pain in the ass whenever you want to test a new line of code you just wrote. This was a show stopper for me.
• No UDF support

VSTO pro

• Good deployment options

Excel DNA con

• Absolutely no good documentation or reference material whatsoever anywhere. Hopeless to learn.

So I'm back using VBA. As bad as one may consider it to be, it's still the best alternative according to this user.