How to call a DLL from excel?

[Landcruiser87]

Greetings to the masses of excel officianado's,

When it comes to using VBA to manipulate excel, i don't have too many quandaries, yet when it comes to communicating with other programs, i'm not up to speed. I was given the SDK to a third party software to interact with monitoring device that spits out numbers i'd like to see directly imported to Excel. I was told i could use the DLL provided in the SDK to access its functions and transfer them via VBA. Yet i needed to call the function FS_Initialize before i can access any of the functions. So i've been trying for the past week to access it but i just can't get it right. It looks like the DLL was written in C#/C++/Visual Studio

I've tried registering it with regsvr32, but get the error

"The module "ForesightAccessDLL.dll" was loaded, but the entry-point Dllregisterserver was not found"


I've also tried declaring it within VBA

Public Declare Function FS_Initialize Lib "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\ForesightAccessDLL.dll" (ByRef Arg1 as Integer, ByRef Arg2 as integer) as Boolean

But then when i try to call the function, i get this error

"Can't find entry point FS_Initialize in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\ForesightAccessDLL.dll"

This is where i find myself currently stuck. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks as always,

Andy

 

[Kenneth Hobson]

How did you call it?

 

[Landcruiser87]

I attempted calling it with the following code

Sub Test

Dim arg1 as integer
Dim arg2 as integer

arg1 = 1
arg2 = 1

If FS_INITIALIZE(Arg1, Arg2) = False Then
[INDENT]Dim Num as integer
    
Num = MsgBox("It worked")
End
End If[/INDENT]
End Sub

 

[Kenneth Hobson]

Since the DLL does not have an entry point, one might try to make a TLB file and reference that.

 

[Landcruiser87]

Thanks!

I'll see if i can generate one.

 

[Kenneth Hobson]

Tlbexp.exe could not create the TLB.

This returns False:

Declare Function FS_Initialize _
  Lib "x:\DLLs\ForesightAccessDLL.dll" _
  Alias "_FS_Initialize@8" _
  (ByRef arg1 As Integer, ByRef arg2 As Integer) As Boolean

Sub ForesightAccessDLL()
  Dim arg1 As Integer, arg2 As Integer
  arg1 = 1
  arg2 = 1

  MsgBox FS_Initialize(arg1, arg2)
End Sub