Looking for some advice from a Windows perspective. Hopefully someone can relate, or at least understands what I am trying to accomplish (keep in mind the "path of least resistance"). I am open to multiple suggestions and paradigms, just try to sugar coat if you can :) I know something needs to change here, Im just hesitant which direction I want to go.
Background:
I might call myself a Windows poweruser, but I historically only kept Microsoft around so I could play Starcraft; IMO, Wings Of Liberty is worth having Windows7 on a primary partition! I've programmed many platforms/languages/applications. From Flash websites scribed in raw actionscript backed with Lighttpd/PHP, to horrible implementations of BASIC on 20 year old Servo systems. My comfort workstation boots right into a Bourne again shell (at least its an xterm ;] ) with a home directory littered with Py(2.6) scripts.
Enter Windows/Office:
I am starting up a company with all the data cohesion resting on me at the moment. I don't have time to show the entire office the true power of the Free side of the force (MSOffice is a good fit for this anyhow). I am finally building my first MS Office tapeball. My major data imports and exports are most likely going to be formatted Excel sheets. From there I am hooking into some AutoCAD and a fair amount of Acrobat (fueled by Word and Excel), with Access on the backend of it all.
My Holdups:
Im still a very text oriented, command-line driven guy, as such I've been forcing Python for all of my glue. Its not so bad, but I keep wanting to embed scripts into my documents, which is dirty at best, and not possible most of the time (embedded code only works on my machine). I despise VBScript. I've had to hack enough of it to know it decent, but I refuse to pick up a proper reference and commit it to memory (so far at least).
Python/COM isn't so bad...still I can't help but wonder if there is something better out there. I need some automagical pushing/pulling of semi-structured data. I need some semi-smart workbooks (.xls) to hand out and then collect later and feed into a parser. Network based backbone won't do (not directly at least).
How do you do your data automation? VBScript worth a hoot? .NET? Any way to avoid compiling? I don't mind new API's but don't make my brain explode. I prolly just need to hire a M$ geek and quit wasting my time. But don't count me out just yet, show me the missing link I havn't heard about ;)
....
ChadP