Microsoft Excel 2010 XLL Software Development Kit 1.0 Beta

The SDK exposes all relevant Excel 2010 functionality to XLL add-in developers, and introduces two new "power UDF" capabilities - Asynchronous user-defined functions (UDF), and HPC function remoting.The purpose of the SDK is twofold: - To make sure that all relevant Excel 2010 functionality is available to XLL add-in developers. This includes all new worksheet functions, and the ability to create 64-bit versions of XLL add-ins. - To introduce two exciting new "power UDF" capabilities: Asynchronous UDFs; and remoting function calls to HPC (High-Performance Computing) clusters. Asynchronous UDFs are exactly what they sound: you can create a user-defined function (UDF) which starts some asynchronous process (such as sending out a request) and immediately returns. Excel tracks the pending result. When the result becomes available, the add-in sends it back to Excel through a call-back function. This lets you send out many external requests at the same time, to be concurrently run on external resources. In addition, if you have a High-Performance Computing cluster (aka a "grid"), you can register existing, synchronous functions as "cluster safe", and have Excel automatically send calls to them to be executed remotely and asynchronously on the cluster - without needing to rewrite the functions as asynchronous. Asynchronous user-defined functions (UDF), and HPC function remoting