Ambiguity Between method ‘Microsoft. Office. Interop. Excel. _Worksheet. Activate()’ and Non-method ‘Microsoft. Office. Interop. Excel. DocEvents

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Ambiguity Between method ‘Microsoft. Office. Interop. Excel. _Worksheet. Activate()’ and Non-method ‘Microsoft. Office. Interop. Excel. DocEvents _Event. Activate’

If you are getting this error in VSTO 2005 SE using the 2003 PIAs it's because the Microsoft. Office. Interop. Excel. Worksheet class inherits both an Activate method and an Activate event, from the Microsoft. Office. Interop. Excel. _Worksheet and Microsoft.Office. Interop. Excel. DocEvents _Event interfaces, respectively. To fix this warning you have to make it more clear to the compiler which one you mean by casting the worksheet to the interface, like so...

//GS - Go to sheet named SheetName
Worksheet ws = _inputWorkbook.Sheets[SheetName] as Worksheet;
(ws as Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel._Worksheet).Activate();

Sometimes I really hate strongly typed languages; why can't we all just use Smalltalk? :-)