Everything you need to know about building Office solutions in Visual Studio is on the new Office Development with Visual Studio Developer Center! (update your bookmarks: http://msdn.com/vsto)

- Right on the home page meet MVPs and members of the product team who share tips, tricks, presentations, and trip reports about meeting developers like you.

- Download code samples and tools that showcase Office and Visual Studio features or access shared source projects on Codeplex that are using Visual Studio to build Office solutions.

- Watch educational and entertaining videos about Office development, watch team interviews and demonstrations.

- Learn new skills by browsing the learning resources by topic or learning type as well as get easy access to the MSDN library resources you need.

- Meet your forum moderators and access other developer community resources.

- Get quick access to news and featured resources and take a peek at what’s coming in Visual Studio 2010!

Make it your new home today. :-)

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

Recently in the Visual Studio Tools for Office forum, a Visual Studio 2008 SP1 developer asked how to include the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 in the same directory as the application.  For example, you can select Download prerequisites from the same location as my application in the Prerequisites Dialog Box if your application is going out on CD and being installed without a network connection. 

However, when you try to build your setup project or ClickOnce installer, you see the following error message: "The install location for prerequisites has not been set to 'component vendor's web site' and the file 'DotNetFX35SP1\dotNetFX20\netfx20a_x86.msi' in item '.NET Framework 3.5 SP1' can not be located on disk. "

What does it mean?  The installers for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 were not included in the VS2008 SP1 installer due to size restrictions. The default deployment experience is to download the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 from the Microsoft Download Center during installation. 

How do you include the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1? You can download the full .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installer and extract the necessary files to the Visual Studio bootstrapper directory. After you modify the product.xml file and update the PublicKey value, the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 will appear in the Prerequisites Dialog Box. You can find the full instructions in the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Readme in section 2.3.1.1 Enable Samesite for the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 bootstrapper package.

While these steps may seem lengthy, you only have to complete the steps once on your development computer. Then, every project you develop and deploy can include .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 as a prerequisite.

If you have further questions about deployment, visit the ClickOnce and Setup & Deployment MSDN forum to search for answers or ask your questions.

Happy deployment!

Mary R Lee, programming writer.

Hi Folks!  If you're not one of the 4,000 professionals attending DevConnections in Las Vegas, then never fear!  You can see my demos and learn about my session "Office Development with Visual Studio 2008" from this blog entry! 

VS 2008 lets you target Office 2003 or Office 2007.  We recommend that you only install one version of Office on your development computer.  If you find yourself developing for both versions often, then I suggest creating a dual-boot computer with Office 2003 on one boot, and Office 2007 on the other.  If you develop mostly for one version, and occasionally target the other, then a Virtual PC image would be fine, if you have enough RAM.  I have 2Gig on my laptop, which is not enough for a VPC running Visual Studio.  My desktop computer back in Redmond has 4G, which is plenty.

FAQ: If you choose to ignore my recommendation and have 2 versions of Office on your development computer, then you may have some weirdness when you try to Debug and the debugger loads the wrong versions of some Office DLLs.  If you try to open an Office 2003 project and you keep getting the Upgrade Wizard, and you don't want to, then uncheck the "Always Upgrade" option in the Tools\Options dialog as shown in this funny video and in this photo below:

Excel And Ribbon Demo

• Excel and Word templates let you program to the document surface
• Word Content Controls, Bookmarks
• Excel cells, Named Ranges, and Charts
• Your custom Ribbon tabs can scope to just one document
• Demo code:  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386198.aspx
• Try clicking on the outermost top edge of the Ribbon Designer and then setting the property "Start from Scratch" = True.   Then add another Tab to the Ribbon Designer and set the ControlId = TabInsert and ControlType = Office and OfficeId = TabInsert as seen below:

VBA interop with VB .NET

Check out this really nice VBA Interop demo by my Scottish colleague, The Moth! 

Databinding

This part of my demo failed on Tuesday because my security ticket had expired, which made my Windows Authentication login to the database fail.  The problem was that I last received an Active Directory authentication on Friday afternoon when I logged in to my domain in Redmond, Washington.  Then I flew to Vegas and worked on my laptop without logging in to the corporate domain.  By Tuesday afternoon my kerberos ticket had expired, which made my Windows Integrated Security database logins fail.  A failure like that in front of an audience of 100 people is an EPIC FAIL!  Oops.

In conclusion, I will in the future use SQL Authentication instead of Windows Authentication for demonstrations when I am on-the-road for conferences.

• Demo code:  Databound Word Content Controls http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb157875.aspx

Developing Outlook Add-Ins

• Multiple Document Interface
• Inspector Windows
• Folders and Forms
• Developer UI Elements
  • Ribbon and Menus
  • Custom Task Panes
  • Outlook Form Regions
• Outlook Task Pane Demo code: I used a variation on this code http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb772082.aspx
• Outlook Form Region video by The Moth

Deploying Office Solutions

• Office Security is crucial
• Office 2003 deployment is different from 2007
• Office 2003 deployment model in VS 2008 is the same as it was in VSTO 2005
• Office 2007 solution deployment is completely new technology in VS 2008
  • Leverages ClickOnce Cache
  • ClickOnce Automatic Update and Rollback
  • Prerequisites included in Setup
    (runtime and .NET Framework)
• Demo steps:  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb608592.aspx
• Lots of session questions were about deployment and you can click on the Tag "Deployment" in this blog to see lots and lots of posts on the topic. 

Deployment Best Practices

• Test your deployment on another computer that does NOT have Visual Studio installed
• I use a test matrix of Virtual PC images on an external hard drive

Conclusion

I hope this information is useful as a reference for those who attended my session and for those of you who were unable to attend.   

-Christin Boyd, Program Manager

They just released a new video on the VSTO Portal and Office Dev Center that I thought I would particularly call out because it works with one of the VSTO Power Tools that the team released in February. In this video Ty Anderson shows how to find an ImageID for Office Ribbon icons using the RibbonID VSTO Power Tool. You can download the VSTO Power Tools here. This video shows how to:

• Open the RibbonID tool window in Visual Studio
• Use the tool to browse for available images
• Search for images
• Assign an image from the RibbonID tool window as the image for a RibbonButton control

Watch the video here.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

Even if you missed PDC, you can still watch the sessions and comment on the content on http://microsoftpdc.com. Here's a few of the great sessions that were presented that I recommend watching:

Office Business Applications: Enhanced Deployment

Under the Hood: Advances in the .NET Type System

Open XML Format SDK: Developing Open XML Solutions

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

A new community submitted article was just released on the Office Development with Visual Studio portal by MVP Alessandro Del Sole. In this article learn how to control the Vista operating system's speech recognition engine in .NET from a custom task pane in Microsoft Word 2007. This article compliments Alessandro's previous article on a text-to-speech add-in for Word 2007.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

If you missed the announcement on the VSTO Developer Portal, the team released a tool called AddInSpy that helps diagnosing problems with Office Add-ins. Andrew Whitechapel talks about it on his blog here.

Also check out and download the VSTO Power Tools which Andrew, myself, and the team has blogged about before. This download is packed with tools that make your life much easier when developing Office solutions. So if you don't have them already, what are you waiting for? Download AddInSpy and the Power Tools now!

Also stay up to date with announcement, videos, downloads, etc from the team by visiting the VSTO Developer Portal.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

In Deploying an Office solution using Windows Installer, you read how to deploy document-level Office 2007 solutions with Windows Installer.  As a follow up, you can now see how to add a Setup project to your VSTO solution and add a custom action to update custom document properties. This example uses Excel 2007, but you can apply these principles to any document-level customization.

Deploying Excel Document-level Customizations with Windows Installer

This video is based on the whitepaper: Deploying a Visual Studio Tools for the Office System 3.0 Solution for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Using Windows Installer (Part 2 of 2), where you can get the code and follow along step-by-step.

Mary Lee, Programming Writer.

In Deploying an Office solution using Windows Installer, you read how to deploy application-level Office 2007 solutions with Windows Installer.  As a follow up, you can now see how to add a Setup project to your VSTO solution and create registry keys. This example uses Excel 2007, but you can apply these principles to any application-level add-in.

Deploying Excel Application-level Add-ins with Windows Installer

This video is based on the whitepaper: Deploying a Visual Studio Tools for the Office System 3.0 Solution for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Using Windows Installer (Part 1 of 2), where you can get the code and follow along step-by-step.

Mary Lee, Programming Writer.

One of our loyal blog readers asked if "VSTO officially supports targeting the Client Profile? I did a quick check and it seems to be working fine but it is good if we explicitly mention whether it is supported."  The answer is yes.  Starting in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1), you can develop 2007 Microsoft Office solutions with .NET Framework version 3.5 or .NET Framework Client Profile. The .NET Framework Client Profile is a subset of the full .NET Framework 3.5 that has a size of 25-30 MB.  For more information about the .NET Framework Client Profile, see .NET Framework Client Profile.

You can read more about how to target the Client Profile in the localized documentation article "How to:  Change the Target .NET Framework" 

If you build a solution with the Client Profile, then please let us know by commenting on this page.  Does the performance suite your needs?  How was the experience?

-Christin Boyd, Program Manager

You can search the text in any open Microsoft Office Word document for specific strings if you put the code in an application-level add-in. When you find an instance of the string, you can perform some action on it. This video shows how to flag the string with a comment that contains text passed in from a calling method.

The code comes from the forum thread that's linked below, under "Related resources." You could just look at it there, but then you'd miss the whole "why did he get knocked in the head last time" thing. Oh, the title is different in the video because no one would search the Web for "to hunt lives the add-in" to answer this question, but I think it's a much more dramatic title for a video about an add-in that searches for stuff, after you've already found the video.

Related resources:

Forum: Look for a string and comment it - how?

How to: Search for Text in Documents

How to: Set Search Options in Word

Find Object (Word 2007 Reference)

Duration: 3 minutes, 39 seconds

When you build an add-in project, it installs the add-in on your development computer. Even if you close that project and start another, or even close Visual Studio entirely, all add-ins you have built will still run when you start the Office application on that computer. If you're not expecting the add-in to run, you might be surprised by what you see the next time you open the application or test a new project. This video shows how to easily uninstall add-ins from your development computer after you build them if you don't want them to run any more. Basically, you run Clean Solution, which is on the Build menu. But watch the video for proof!

Related resources:

Forum: Multiple add-ins running

Office Solution Build Process Overview

Duration: 2 minutes, 50 seconds

You can easily customize the Ribbon to show only the controls you want to display. This video shows how to clear the Ribbon in Microsoft Office Word so it contains only a single button. The button inserts a graphic into the open Word document at the cursor location. Why? Well, really it's just to demo the Ribbon thing. But some day you might want to insert images into a document too, who knows?

Related resources

Forum: Ribbon and Start from Scratch

OfficeRibbon.StartFromScratch Property

Duration: 4 minutes, 11 seconds

I just posted an interview with Kris Makey on Channel9. Kris is a Developer on the Office Client team. Here he shows us a couple new features of Office projects in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. First he demonstrates a new error logging feature that will log any end-user install errors to the Event Log making it much easier to tell what went wrong. He also shows us how you can place Winforms controls directly on document surfaces.

For more information on Office Development with Visual Studio visit the developer portal at http://msdn.com/vsto.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

With the release of Visual Studio 2008 SP1, you can now add smart tags to Excel by using an add-in.  In this video, I show you how to add them to both a document-level customization and an add-in project.

How Do I: Add Smart Tags to Excel Workbooks?

This video is based on the topic: How to: Add Smart Tags to Excel Workbooks, where you can get the code and follow along step-by-step.