How do I draw my bitmap in a disabled state
Use the DrawImageDisabled method of the ControlPaint class.
How can I read and display Excel files from within my C# application
.NET’s interoperability makes it easy to work with COM Capable Applications such as Word and Excel. See Mike Gold’s article on C# Corner for a detailed discussion.
Are there any books out there that focus on COM interop
Check out NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide by Adam Nathan Adam Nathan is a software design engineer on Microsoft’s .NET Common Language Runtime QA team. ISBN: 067232170X
Are there any tools that allow me to view the rich meta data that .NET assemblies have? Is there a OLEVIEW equivalent for .NET?
Currently, the best one that I know of is the Reflector for .NET by Lutz Roeder. You can find it here along with other useful tools. Reflector for .NET You can also use the Windows Class Viewer (wincv.exe) and ILDASM (ildasm), both of which come with the .NET framework.
How do I start Visual Studio.NET from the command line
Simply type devenv.exe from the command line. If you get a message like this, then you do not have devenv.exe in your path. >>> ’devenv.exe’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. >>> To fix this simply run the batch file, vsvars32.bat that comes with Visual Studio.NET from the command line in the working folder. After you run this batch file devenv.exe will be available from the command line in that folder.