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Show HN: I've built a C# IDE, Runtime, and AppStore inside Excel (querystorm.com)

670 points by anakic ↗ HN
The project is called QueryStorm. It uses Roslyn to offer C# (and VB.NET) support in Excel, as an alternative to VBA. I've posted about it before, but a lot has changed since then so figured I'd share an update.

The current version includes a host of new features, namely a C# debugger, support for NuGet packages, and the ability to publish Excel extensions to an "AppStore" (which is essentially a NuGet repository). The AppStore can be used by anyone with the (free) runtime component.

Another great addition is the community license, which is a free license for individuals and small companies to use. It unlocks most features, but it isn't intended for companies with more than 5 employees or over $1M in annual revenue.

I would love to hear your feedback and am happy to answer any technical questions about how QueryStorm is implemented.

182 comments

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HeckFeck
Very cool. Should be a part of Excel tbh. LINQ is much better suited for data munging than JavaScript.
qwerty456127
F# is even better.
eitland
Maybe, but I think C# has the advantage that "everyone" knows it or Java so it is trivial to get started.

Last I checked, admittedly a couple of years ago, starting with F# wasn't absolutely trivial.

eckza
It is, if you know where to look.

Therein lies the problem. The language doesn't have much marketshare, and few champions.

I just finished reading Scott Wlaschin's Domain Driven Design for Functional Programmers and it's an incredible, batteries-included guide that goes from "hello world" to "and here's how you use it in an organization" in a few hundred pages.

I wish I had been exposed to it about a decade ago. Incredibly easy to follow and well-explained.

fsloth
This! Other good books are ”Expert F#” by Granicz, Syme & Cisternino, ”Real world functional programming” by Petricek and ”F# for scientists” by Harrop. The last is old but still really great in succintly explaining what ’new&unfamiliar’ structures in F# are great for pragmatic software engineering.

Why is there so little noise in F# land? I have no data, but I can guess that the language is so unproblematic that everybody is just happily coding instead of explaining how to fix something. It’s also not very good at guis so there is usually nothing visual to demonstrate.

grugagag
What’s the markershare though? F# is great but Microsoft made it sortof a second class citizen
fsloth
F# is installed by default with Visual Studio, and the tooling is pretty good. I think it hardly is second class citizen? Not promoted nearly as much as C# for sure.

AFAIK F# is on quite solid foundation, as there is the F# foundation that would keep ball rolling, so to speak, were Microsoft to renounce the language.

I have no idea what the marketshare is though. On Tiobe (https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index) it seems to be nearly on par wit Scala and much more popular than Haskell or Ocaml.

pjmlp
Pretty good if only what one cares about is CLI and class libraries.

According to JetBrains developer survey, an amazing 3%.

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2022/csharp/

fsloth
Tooling: Not only CLI and classlibs. The debugger in Visual Studio follows calls to c/c++ dll:s over pinvoke withhout a cinch. (Same as C#). If you wrap complex entities in e.g. Protobuf then writing hybrid applications is pretty straighforward and on solid ground.

All of the GUI stuff is missing of course. I would not advice to implement a GUI on top of F#.

The main feature of F# imo is it's succint type system where one can wrap everything in a type without much bureaucratic cost, but in a way that makes program structure so much more obvious. "If it compiles it's correct" is prety much how it goes.

pjmlp
Not enough to justify many .NET shops to go multi-lingual projects.

They already have to use C# no matter what, given the GUI and database frameworks.

Adding C++ or PowerShell into the mix might happen, due to the frameworks and workloads that require reaching out to them.

While adding F#, even if more expressive, it barely makes sense from business point of view.

It isn't as if a mixed C#/F# codebase brings the same value as doing Python/C++.

Also to note that while F# team has pivoted into trying to make F# attractive to data science, their employer is one of the reasons why CPython is now taking performance more seriously.

qwerty456127
> While adding F#, even if more expressive, it barely makes sense from business point of view.

F# code is much more reliable and requires much less people to write. Isn't this good for business?

The only problem with F# is it's not always immediately readable to those who are not familiar with it (so it's harder to find the people to hire), isn't it?

I just wonder how much harder it is to teach a random person (without even a rudimentary programming skill) to code F# than to teach them C#.

fsloth
I would claim the business benefit of F# would come from a more succint, legible and correct codebase that saves developer time, but I have no basis for that argument except intuition I get having developed both in C# and F#. Also I know much better engineers than me to whom this would be a nill-argument ("You can write everything really fast, just don't make mistakes").

"It isn't as if a mixed C#/F# codebase brings the same value as doing Python/C++."

I think it depends on industry and domain what the value add specifically is? To me it would totally make sense to have small, succinct business logic module in F# that talks natively to a verbose chunk of C# wpf for instance.

"Also to note ... CPython is now taking performance more seriously."

Personally I would not hold Python isomorphic to F# on any architectural level, the former not having the typesystem of F#. IMO the whole point of F# is the wonderful typesystem, immutability first, combined with full .NET ecosystem.

On the other hand I would not try to use F# for the stuff I use Python for - so trying to take Python head on does not sound like a super good strategy.

I guess F# will languish in the "few percenter limbo" in the best case. But it IS a really nice language :)

eckza
I think that the problem is that:

- fsharp's big selling point is that it runs on dotnet - most FP ideologues run screaming from M$, and there are other, better (subjectively), more-active FP langs that do many of the same things, such as OCaml and Haskell - most dotnet shops are "csharp or die" and getting fsharp adoption is more or less an impossible task for cultural reasons

I support fsharp and generally like it, but I'm not reaching for it for net-new stuff that doesn't already have a dependency on dotnet. $0.02.

qwerty456127
F# is a better OCaml. Haskell is too different to compare.
fsloth
"most FP ideologues run screaming from M$"

This can be also a blessing that makes the F# community quite pragmatic rather than dogmatic :)

FP makes pragmatic sense, it's not an ideological concept.

pjmlp
For that you already have PowerQuery on Excel.

As for being better, F# is better on the language level, but sadly sucks on the tooling effort for .NET frameworks, that Microsoft is willing to spend on it.

ragebol
No questions, just complimenting on what looks like a great, very very useful product.
andysinclair
Looks great, will give it a try (as a fellow Excel developer).

One small point: on your webpage the "Try QueryStorm out" button on the "Start a free trial" panel just points to: https://querystorm.com/csharp-in-excel/ rather than the generate key page.

petepete
Hey Anakic, I remember posting a link to ThingieQuery here many years ago (2016 maybe?). Glad to see it's gone from strength to strength!
anakic
Yeah, ThingieQuerie it was called back then:) Thanks, I appreciate the kind words!
keithalewis
Does this use https://excel-dna.net/ behind the scenes?
anakic
Yeah, the runtime component is an ExcelDNA addin. The IDE component is a VSTO addin. Since VSTO doesn't allow defining custom functions I switched to using ExcelDNA for the runtime.
keithalewis
Please consider acknowledging that on your website.
anakic
I would love to but I'm a bit scared to fiddle with the post now while it's trending. I think it's mentioned in a few places on the website, but not in this blog post. I do also use a bunch of other libraries, but yeah, ExcelDNA is one of the critical ones so mentioning it would be in order.
andysinclair
What did you use to write the installer, and how do you determine if the targeted version of Excel is 32 or 64 bit?

I've built an Excel-DNA based Add-in (https://www.excelpricefeed.com/) and distribute it via an installer built using Advanced Installer. It works well, the only real pain point is the the user has to find out which version of Excel they have installed in order to choose the correct download (32 or 64 bit).

anakic
I use Wix for the installer. Can't remember how I dealt with that particular issue, but ping me at antonio [at] querystorm.com in a day or two, if you're interested, and I'll have a look at how exactly I dealt with it.
ycuser2
I would have used the hell out of it 8 years ago! VBA IDE was a pain.

Great work!

kungfufrog
Will this only work on Excel running on Windows 10/11 X64?
anakic
It works on Excel 2013 onwards but only on Windows. Both x86 and x64 are supported. Mac isn't supported I'm afraid.
kungfufrog
Show stopper for me, but can I just say what a fantastic product and the article introducing it kept me hooked to the end!
anakic
I have to do my own marketing, so I'm trying to blog more often these days. Really glad to hear you enjoyed the writing!
throwaway90650
Is there a technical blocker on macOS Excel side that prevents you from implementing it, or is it just a matter of priorities?
anakic
A bit of both. On the Windows side I can use VSTO or ExcelDNA to integrate with Excel, but neither is available on the Mac. One alternative I'd like to try is a web-based version which would use Blazor and the Monaco editor but I'm really not sure if that would be at all doable. I don't have the time to go there at the moment, but I'd love to try at some point.
OJFord
Oh a plug-in, ha, for some reason I read the title and thought this was a 'just to show I can' type implementation of all those things actually in Excel, 'Doom in Excel' sort of thing.

This seems far more useful!

whoisthemachine
I also thought this was going to be an article about implementing a C# compiler in excel! This on the other hand seems like a very neat product.
anakic
Thanks! Yeah, I probably should have made the title "...in Excel" instead of "...inside Excel". I wonder if more or fewer people would have clicked on it that way.
maxfurman
If we're being pedantic maybe "for Excel" would be clearer? But what do I know.
hoseja
That would be my choice too. Both "inside" and "in" imply "in the spreadsheet". "For", on the other hand I would understand as "for the Excel program".
anakic
I was considering "for" but I wanted to imply that the IDE is actually located inside Excel, rather than being a separate program.
yAak
Yeah, I thought you crafted some Excel monstrosity based on the title. Maybe a mod can change the title for you to say "for Excel."

Also, I would be super proud if I'd created this. Excellent work!!!

the_only_law
I would have been both immensely impressed and immensely horrified if that were the case.
lofatdairy
I had the same thought lol. Honestly, the fact that such a thing seems possible at all should be props to the people who built Excel
denismurphy
Hats off @anakic this is class! It would be a game-changer if Microsoft licensed QueryStorm built in to Excel. Let's hope the right people at Microsoft are paying attention to you.
anakic
Thanks! Wouldn't mind that outcome one bit. It's hard to get exposure and adoption for a platform like this without some serious muscle backing it. I suspect Microsoft has its sights set on the cloud, though, but still, it would be amazing if they adopted QueryStorm.
cm2187
Microsoft actually built that already, then they decided to kill it. It was called VSTA (not to be confused with VSTO). It shipped with one of the apps of Office 2007.
anakic
At first I thought you were referring to VSTO, then I saw the "not to be confused with VSTO" part. I had no idea this ever existed. Thanks for mentioning it. I wonder why they decided to pull the plug back then.
cm2187
I suspect it must have been part of "let's try to secure / lockdown office", "users writing codes is bad, they should only push buttons", and at the same time they tried to make it as hard as possible to use VBA (all sorts of warnings and things disabled by default, etc)

I am also aware of a commercial product that offers a .net IDE to be embeded into your software, though I never tried it: https://www.alternetsoft.com/products/scripter

kleiba
Funnily, QueryStorm uses VSTO behind the scenes: the IDE component is a VSTO addin.
samsquire
This is absolutely awesome.

The combination of a spreadsheet, database and data scripting runtime would be extremely powerful.

This is where Airtable, nocodb and baserow are candidates.

I worked at a company that used gridgain with Excel as a cluster to process models on lots of servers.

I suspect there's a lot of low level Windows integration details about how to integrate with Excel. COM objects and DLLs.

Why is integrating with software so difficult? Very few people know how to do it.

How you design software that is extensible?

Atom was extensible and VS Code is less so.

Why has nobody integrated the web browser with QT? So we can browse into a Qt application. So you can create desktop widgets and canvases with Qt from Javascript? That way you could ship desktop software and arbitrary integrations to software.

TeMPOraL
> Why is integrating with software so difficult? Very few people know how to do it.

I feel it's because of inherent conflict of interests and priorities. A software product can provide services to the user, or provide services to other programs. It's rare to see one that does both, because the two goals seem often at odds.

Say you're writing a software component for other programs to use. You probably have some specific programs in mind, some of which are end-user-facing. In this case, you may not want to spend resources on developing user-facing UI and features that make your product usable stand-alone - you'd likely end up competing with your own customers.

Say you're writing user-facing software instead. You want to own the entire user experience. Mixing UI, user interaction and the "business problem"-solving code together lets you work faster. Also, you don't want to make it easy for anyone to integrate with the core of your software, because that would be inviting competitors to own the user experience while using your own backend, ruining all kinds of marketing shenanigans you'd rather play on your users.

I don't like this, but I see there's a mix of both reasonable and greedy reasons why software isn't developed with integration in mind.

The major exception here is when the platform on which the software runs encourages, insists on, or demands the software to allow for integration. Windows does that to an extent with COM / DCOM. Emacs does that by its nature. But it's only moving the problem one level up - e.g. Microsoft environment can't integrate well with Apple environment.

brendank310
OT: You can do that with Qt. We played with implementing it ourselves for a project about 10 years ago. Since then I think there is an official QPA that will render Qt apps within the browser, and there is the Wt project. Might be worth looking at for some needs but I don't see it becoming popular.
JustLurking2022
Honest question - by the time you're scaling with GridGain, why are you still using Excel? Even Python is probably faster by a decent margin.
inglor
I work on Excel at Microsoft and this is really cool. I’ll check it out and share it with the rest of the R&D.
anakic
Thanks, that's great!! <3
andysinclair
Do you know if this item from the Microsoft 365 roadmap would stop Add-ins (xll files) like this from working?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filter...

I also have a vested interest as one of my software products is an xll Add-in. Any further details from Microsoft would be most welcome, thanks.

anakic
No idea, haven't seen this until now. Hopefully they provide a mechanism for allowing legitimate addins to get around it. Perhaps using a code signing cert (which I do) or an EV certificate would be appropriate. Security has been a bit of nightmare with Excel addins. I've had to deal with false positives on and off again a bunch of times already. First it was windows smart screen, then antivirus vendors every so often. It's a slog...
tech234a
Typically you can go into the file properties and check the “Unblock” checkbox to remove what Microsoft calls the “Mark of the Web”.
inglor
Open us a feedback through the app. We actually read every tiny bit.
Tempest1981
Cool. How can I turn off the animated cursor movement in Excel? And Outlook? Drives me crazy. I keep submitting feedback. Even a registry hack is fine.
gadders
Jan 2024 - Microsoft releases Excel with it's own built-in C# IDE, doesn't credit original developer.
giancarlostoro
They might be likely to offer him a job there honestly. The architect of C# was poached from Borland after all.
addandsubtract
How'd that go for the AppGet dev?
giancarlostoro
Not familiar with this story.
xbar
Nor was I. It's worth a search and read.
VWWHFSfQ
I always felt that there was more to that story than what was reported. My understanding is they reached out to him to interview for a PM role to develop an official "AppGet" at Microsoft but, for whatever reason, he didn't get the job. Maybe the interviews didn't go well? Maybe there were some red flags somewhere? Who knows. But it didn't really sound to me like they acted in bad faith.
gadders
I hope it does work out for the original author and he deserves it but there have been cases before where concepts have been taken from their originator and implemented by the large corporate with no cash or even credit given.
xbar
Maybe this was a better initial comment.
IncRnd
Even today, it isn't Embrace, Extend, Employ.
pjmlp
No he wasn't, he left Borland after being disappointed how things were going.

He declined several approaches from ex-Borland people working at Microsoft, before reaching that point.

https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-c...

giancarlostoro
Interesting, the story I've heard from various Senior Engineers is that Microsoft poached him by offering him a ton of money. Crazy to think they all repeated a tech urban legend I guess
IshKebab
Honestly it's annoying that they haven't already done that. I was surprised a few years ago when I checked and it didn't exist.
inglor
Oh boy you don’t know what our culture looks like. It’s more “it’s cool that people are building on top of it and we want to figure out how we can make it easier”
iforgotpassword
People didn't forget this story: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/28/21272964/microsoft-winget...
inglor
Oh Microsoft the company is not to be trusted and is not your friend. It’s a huge company with many employees and products. Moreover I can’t attest to any other group’s culture - I can only say what we do in Excel.

In Excel working hard to make addons possible and trying to foster an ecosystem of users sharing expertise is a focus as well as community building and smbs.

Taking a cool community project and doing it ourselves would shooting our selves in the foot.

More than once I didn’t do things or work in features for that reason.

Again not because Microsoft is your friend but because it’s in our business interest.

I don’t speak for Microsoft or Excel and am just a developer/hacker ;)

pyth0
I got this impression as well. I worked on a team two years back building out a very complex Excel plugin using Excel.js. The SDK has quite a few quirks and we ran into some problems along the way, but the team at Microsoft responsible for it was happy to help and interested in hearing feedback and features we wanted. A positive experience :)
mst
I always got the feeling that because it's such a key product the Excel team was basically its own organisation within the wider corporation and as a result had a lot more freedom to make its own choices.

(not that I'm arguing for trust that would, as you say, be misplaced, but if my feeling is correct then the Excel org's englightened self interest can diverge from the mothership's self interest more than other divisions can, which makes the calculations as to what your management is likely to decide notably different)

pjmlp
Traditionally Microsoft has had three big feuds.

Apps (where Office belongs), DevDiv (VS, .NET and such), WinDev (Windows, C, C++).

All of them used to compete quite a lot among themselves.

No idea how it looks like nowadays with all the business units, but I get a feeling that WinDev vs DevDiv is still a thing.

gompertz
A little off topic but will Typescript support ever come to desktop Excel or is it just going to remain on the web version? Office Scripts are great but bit of a bummer I can only write them for web.
airstrike
May I suggest a new feature? I imagine there's no real hard reason why Data Validation won't take dynamic arrays. It would be amazing to use UNIQUE or even FILTER in the Custom format. I've tried all sorts of workarounds including defining named ranges, using INDIRECT, etc. but it seems like I inevitably need to create a range for Data Validation to work

Which in turn leads me to think there should be a way to create a virtual Range object in VBA that isn't really in a sheet (or a VirtualRange object that is similar enough to Range to make it work for most purposes). If one were to refactor Range entirely (not suggesting that), it seems like the issue is that the Range object actually encapsulates two different data representations into one jumbled up object: (1) cells in a worksheet with properties such as style, fill, value, etc. and (2) a traversable quasi-array data type with useful methods such as offset, rows, columns, etc. Those two things often line up, but not always.

Anyway, I probably spend too much time thinking about Excel :-) </rant>

major505
Now I can use excel. I always sucked doing stuff in excell formulas. With this now I can just linq and spit the info I need.
viggity
devs "hate" excel because you have to reference by col/row (C10 = tax rate, etc). But few devs know that you can name cells (and ranges and tables). Just to the left of the formula bar you'll see a textbox with the default name of the cell (C10). Just delete C10 and call it "tax_rate" and now you can reference "tax_rate" in all your formulas.
major505
I did a lot of shit in excell using vb. Even spreadsheets connected to SAP using COM+ dlls.

But still sucks having to do requests in VB.

TrackerFF
Now sure how known this is, but Excel 365 for Business / Enterprise supports Office Scripts (under a "Automate" tab), where you can create scripts in TypeScript.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/overvie...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop...

gompertz
I just started writing Typescript in Excel. It's really surprising this hasn't taken off more. It works very well, but is only available on Excel Web (not Desktop) application.
actionfromafar
Find a way to connect this to Zapier and the Universe might open up a wormhole.
samstave
Beautiful.

So can people upload their code snips to the appstore such that, say, a marketing data analytics person with no coding experience can pay to get 'buttons' to run queries that are relevant to their needs?

like the salaries example, for example, I used to spend a shit-ton of time educating a CFO on AWS spends in excel.

If I could have a code snip 'button' to use some AWS-CLI creds to pull results directly from AWS asa "CFO BUTTON" and set them up with an easy export to an XLS - and then let them build their own dash to their choice that would be cool.

I havent looked at Cloudability in quite a while, (know the founder) -- but giving a CFO-type an excel button... Every CFO can navigate excel. so they get an invisible tool that empowers them, and relieves stress on the Ops team...

anakic
Yep, that's the idea.

You create a project that defines some custom functions, ribbon commands, context menus, shortcuts etc... and then publish it to a store. Then anyone who has the QueryStorm Runtime (and the url of the store you published to) can install it through the "Extensions" dialog.

I haven't yet set up the ability to charge for packages but I plan on offering this. I first need a community of users, so didn't focus on charging yet.

If you'd like some help setting up something like that AWS scenario, reach me via email: antonio [at] querystorm.com, I've done several such integrations already (Google analytics, Monday.com, TSheets, Google drive).

gadders
Good work, but this is depressing:

"VBA is a bit (a lot) behind the times and Microsoft isn’t planning on upgrading it. Instead, they’re offering a sandboxed JavaScript environment called Office Scripts."

Microsoft - Just swap VBA for Python ffs.

qiqitori
There's a lot of people who only know VBA (in terms of programming languages), and there's a huge amount of VBA code in production out there. Microsoft won't make itself popular by replacing VBA for some silly technical reason, especially not because the syntax is perceived to look better. It's a bit like renaming the SUM function to ADD and expecting everyone to rewrite their formulas.
nycdotnet
Looks awesome. One fundamental issue I always faced with Excel calculations of any kind (formulas or vba) is the lack of ability to source control cleanly (binary format plus data and code are intermingled). This weakness is the other side of the spreadsheet’s greatest strength which is low friction experimentation with data. Does this product attempt to do anything here?
anakic
Thanks!

You can version control the code you write with QueryStorm, to an extent. There are basically two kinds of apps you can build with this: extension apps (where you build general excel functionality) and workbook apps (where you automate a particular workbook).

The code for extension apps is stored in a folder on your machine, and you can version control that easily.

The code for workbook apps is stored inside workbooks. While there's no version control functionality in QueryStorm, it does let you export code from a workbook into a folder, as well as import code from a folder into a workbook project. There are context menu commands for this in the code explorer pane. This lets you decouple the code from the workbook.

Basically, for version controlling code in a workbook, you'd have to export the code into a folder and version control it there. Exporting into a folder will clear everything from the folder except hidden stuff like the ".git" folder so your git repository will be safe. Not a perfect solution, but it can be done.

whitemary
Can you also import it from the folder?
anakic
Yeah, you can import the folder back into the project and it will replace all of the existing files with the ones from the folder.
cxr
Since XLSX etc. use Microsoft's Open Packaging Convention (a ZIP container consisting of mostly plain text), consider adding native support for unpacking and normalizing the payloads so they can be trivially diffed by existing source control systems.
anakic
It's something to consider, for sure. Perhaps there's an easy win to be had there.
unnah
Have you considered implementing a project folder structure, so that the workbook and the source code could be version controlled together in git, but the IDE would import and export the source automatically from/to the workbook?
anakic
You mean add the workbook itself into the folder as binary file to include in source control? I haven't, but it might make sense, to keep the workbook in sync with the source code.
ckluis
I clicked on resellers & affiliates because I was curious about your terms. They are both empty.