Technical Reference
Microsoft Office Automation
MS Office has been around since the early 1990s and has become the de facto standard in office productivity software. Many developers consider Office 2000 the watershed version that made it a truly extensible suite of programs. This version integrated Visual Basic for Applications throughout the suite and was released about the time Bill Gates published his book, Business at the Speed of Thought.The idea that "how you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose" in the digital economy may seem like a basic enough concept, but it's something Office is very good at and something that made Microsoft a lot of money.
The success of Office, in this developer's opinion, is largely due to the ease with which one can develop custom solutions. This is what Office Automation is all about. The VBA programming language is the cornerstone, and millions of business are using custom solutions built with Office and VBA.
| Office version | Excel, Access | Object library version | VBA version |
| 95 | 95 | 7.0 | 2.0 |
| 97 | 97 | 8.0 | 5.0 |
| 2000 | 2000 | 9.0 | 6.0 |
| XP | 2002 | 10.0 | 6.3 |
| 2003 | 2003 | 11.0 | 6.3 |
The future of VBA and Office Automation
Microsoft plans to replace VBA with Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA), an application customization toolkit based on the .NET Framework. Nevertheless, Microsoft says it will include VBA in Office for the next 2 versions. That is, the 2007 Office System and then the next version beyond that.Will VSTA kill Office? Probably not. But it will put custom solutions out of reach for many users.
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Understanding How IP Traceroute Works
You can use IP traceroute to identify the path that packets take through the network on a hop-by-hop basis. The command output displays all network layer (Layer 3) devices, such as routers, that the traffic passes through on the way to the destination.
Switches can participate as the source or destination of the traceroute command but will not appear as a hop in the traceroute command output.
The traceroute command uses the Time To Live (TTL) field in the IP header to cause routers and servers to generate specific return messages. Traceroute starts by sending a User Datagram Protocol (UDP) datagram to the destination host with the TTL field set to 1. If a router finds a TTL value of 1 or 0, it drops the datagram and sends back an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) time-exceeded message to the sender. The traceroute facility determines the address of the first hop by examining the source address field of the ICMP time-exceeded message.
To identify the next hop, traceroute sends a UDP packet with a TTL value of 2. The first router decrements the TTL field by 1 and sends the datagram to the next router. The second router sees a TTL value of 1, discards the datagram, and returns the time-exceeded message to the source. This process continues until the TTL is incremented to a value large enough for the datagram to reach the destination host (or until the maximum TTL is reached).
To determine when a datagram reaches its destination, traceroute sets the UDP destination port in the datagram to a very large value that the destination host is unlikely to be using. When a host receives a datagram with an unrecognized port number, it sends an ICMP port unreachable error to the source. This message indicates to the traceroute facility that it has reached the destination.